Image and Video Processing for Cultural Heritage

The preservation, archival, and study of cultural heritage is of the utmost importance at local, national, and international levels. Not only global organizations like UNESCO but also museums, libraries, cultural institutions, and private initiatives are working in these directions. During the last three decades, researchers in the field of imaging science have started to contribute a growing set of tools for cultural heritage, thereby providing indispensable support to these efforts. be grouped into two main strands. On the one hand, tools aim to provide easy access to cultural heritage by both the general public and scholars. On the other hand, a substantial body of work wants to ensure its preservation for future generations. An important factor that expedited and boosted the use of image and video processing techniques in cultural heritage applications was the initiation of extensive digitization campaigns by public institutions, museums, libraries, and archives during the last years. As a result, a huge amount of culture-related information is now digitally stored, and thus amenable to digital processing. The field of image and video processing for cultural heritage encompasses a large variety of topics, such as high-resolution 2D and 3D digital capture and rendering of artworks, digital restoration, enhancement, recognition, and classification of features, structures and content in cultural heritage visual data, creation of large-scale multimedia databases of artworks, and user-centered heritage-related visual or multimedia applications. Indeed, image and video processing techniques can significantly improve and make more efficient many aspects of traditional preservation, archival, study, and fruition of our cultural heritage and, very interestingly, can also provide answers to emerging needs. Moreover, they have made feasible the creation of new applications and tools, which would otherwise be impossible to realize. can help with the qualitative and quantitative analysis of cultural artefacts. These high-resolution digital representations , combined with various processing techniques and 3D modelling methods, can then be used to assist with the physical restoration, condition assessment, and examination of artworks. At the same time, digital restoration or reassem-bly of damaged artworks