Image-Based Delineation and Classification of Built Heritage Masonry

Noelia Oses,Abdelmalik Moujahid,Fadi Dornaika

doi:10.3390/rs6031863

Noelia Oses, Abdelmalik Moujahid + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/rs6031863

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Abstract

Fundación Zain is developing new built heritage assessment protocols. The goal is to objectivize and standardize the analysis and decision process that leads to determining the degree of protection of built heritage in the Basque Country. The ultimate step in this objectivization and standardization effort will be the development of an information and communication technology (ICT) tool for the assessment of built heritage. This paper presents the ground work carried out to make this tool possible: the automatic, image-based delineation of stone masonry. This is a necessary first step in the development of the tool, as the built heritage that will be assessed consists of stone masonry construction, and many of the features analyzed can be characterized according to the geometry and arrangement of the stones. Much of the assessment is carried out through visual inspection. Thus, this process will be automated by applying image processing on digital images of the elements under inspection. The principal contribution of this paper is the automatic delineation the framework proposed. The other contribution is the performance evaluation of this delineation as the input to a classifier for a geometrically characterized feature of a built heritage object. The element chosen to perform this evaluation is the stone arrangement of masonry walls. The validity of the proposed framework is assessed on real images of masonry walls.

Highlights

In the last decade, machine vision techniques have been increasingly used in order to assist the process of cultural heritage documentation, preservation and restoration [1,2,3]
Several statistics are extracted from this set of segments and are used as the predictor variables in the classifier
The statistics extracted are listed where the lengths are expressed as a percentage of the image width, the slopes represented in degrees and the slope differences the differences between slopes for every pair of segments in the delineation

Summary

Introduction

Machine vision techniques have been increasingly used in order to assist the process of cultural heritage documentation, preservation and restoration [1,2,3]. Image-based approaches, for example, have been used to automatically detect built heritage decay [4,5,6,7,8]. Much work has been done with the objective of automating the process of 3D modeling of cultural heritage sites or buildings [15,16,17]. Some low-cost computer tools for documenting and analyzing built heritage have already been proposed [19,20,21,22].

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