Automatic 3D modeling and reconstruction of cultural heritage sites from Twitter images

This paper presents an approach for leveraging the abundance of images posted on social media like Twitter for large scale 3D reconstruction of cultural heritage landmarks. Twitter allows users to post short messages, including photos, describing a plethora of activities or events, e.g., tweets are used by travelers on vacation, capturing images from various cultural heritage assets. As such, a great number of images are available online, able to drive a successful 3D reconstruction process. However, reconstruction of any asset, based on images mined from Twitter, presents several challenges. There are three main steps that have to be considered: (i) tweets’ content identification, (ii) image retrieval and filtering, and (iii) 3D reconstruction. The proposed approach first extracts key events from unstructured tweet messages and then identifies cultural activities and landmarks. The second stage is the application of a content-based filtering method so that only a small but representative portion of cultural images are selected to support fast 3D reconstruction. The proposed methods are experimentally evaluated using real-world data and comparisons verify the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.peer-reviewe

Cultural Heritage Storytelling, Engagement and Management in the Era of Big Data and the Semantic Web

The current Special Issue launched with the aim of further enlightening important CH areas, inviting researchers to submit original/featured multidisciplinary research works related to heritage crowdsourcing, documentation, management, authoring, storytelling, and dissemination. Audience engagement is considered very important at both sites of the CH production–consumption chain (i.e., push and pull ends). At the same time, sustainability factors are placed at the center of the envisioned analysis. A total of eleven (11) contributions were finally published within this Special Issue, enlightening various aspects of contemporary heritage strategies placed in today’s ubiquitous society. The finally published papers are related but not limited to the following multidisciplinary topics:Digital storytelling for cultural heritage;Audience engagement in cultural heritage;Sustainability impact indicators of cultural heritage;Cultural heritage digitization, organization, and management;Collaborative cultural heritage archiving, dissemination, and management;Cultural heritage communication and education for sustainable development;Semantic services of cultural heritage;Big data of cultural heritage;Smart systems for Historical cities – smart cities;Smart systems for cultural heritage sustainability