Revolutionizing cultural heritage preservation: an innovative IoT-based framework for protecting historical buildings

Italy offers a cultural heritage of considerable value that needs to be protected. Indeed, natural deterioration linked to the passage of time affects ancient artifacts and buildings. Sometimes, the deterioration compromises the functionality of cultural assets, pushing them toward decay. In this scenario, effective intervention seems impossible on the various critical points because of the wide variability of factors involved and the wide range of possible treatments. However, the spread of low-cost technologies has led to the possibility of having different devices and sensors able to communicate and interact with each other and humans: the Internet of Things (IoT). In this scenario, the IoT paradigm makes it possible to map reality by defining a coherent virtual representation (Digital Twin), which could help preserve Cultural Heritage. This work introduces an IoT-based system combining monitoring, predictive maintenance, and decision-making regarding the implementable interventions for protecting cultural heritage buildings. For this purpose, deep and machine learning techniques allow for the detection and classification of damages on specific materials. The experimental phase consists of two phases: the first aims to evaluate the accuracy of the proposed architecture, and the second exploits a prototype capable of interacting with expert users. The results of the experimental campaign are promising

Super long interval time-lapse image generation for proactive preservation of cultural heritage using crowdsourcing

To establish advanced analytical methods for preserving cultural heritage, this research proposes a method to generate a time-lapse image with a super-long temporal interval. The key issue is to realize an image collection method using crowdsourcing and a method to improve the matching accuracy between images of cultural heritage buildings captured 50 to 100 years ago and current images. As degradation and damage to the appearance of cultural heritage buildings occurs due to ageing, rebuilding, and renovation, image features of the timed images are changed. This decreases the accuracy of the matching process that uses the appearance of patch-region. In addition, we need to give more consideration to incorrect feature correspondence that is prominent in buildings with considerable symmetry. We aim to solve these difficulties by applying an Autoencoder and a guided matching method. Our method involves utilizing the function of crowdsourcing, which can easily obtain the current image captured at the same position and orientation as the past image. We propose this method to address the inability to obtain the correspondence points between two images when observation times are significantly different. © 2019 IEEE