Using mask R-CNN to rapidly detect the gold foil shedding of stone cultural heritage in images

Abstract

As immovable stone cultural heritage is kept in the open air, they are more susceptible to damage, and damage detection is very important for the protection and restoration of cultural heritage. This is especially true for gold-overlaid stone cultural heritage, which is usually more complicated than ordinary stone carvings. However, the detection of cultural heritage damages is mainly based on expert visual inspection, which is often subjective, time-consuming, and laborious. This paper uses the Mask R-CNN algorithm to rapidly and accurately detect the gold foil shedding of stone cultural heritage through two-dimensional images. The research data are from the high-precision images of the Dazu Thousand-Hand Bodhisattva Statue (World Heritage, UNESCO) in Chongqing, China. After cleaning and augmentation, 1900 images are input into Mask R-CNN model for training. Finally, the average precision value (AP) for detecting gold foil shedding is found to be 0.967. In order to test the performance of the model, the new images that do not participate in the training period are used, and it is found that the model can still accurately detect the gold foil shedding even if there are interference factors. This is the first attempt to detect the damages of gold-overlaid stone cultural heritage based on a deep learning algorithm, and it has achieved good results.