A multimedia approach to the diffusion, communication, and exploitation of Cultural Heritage (CH) is a well-established trend worldwide. Several studies demonstrate that the use of new and combined media enhances how culture is experienced. The benefit is in terms of both number of people who can have access to knowledge and the quality of the diffusion of the knowledge itself. In this regard, CH uses augmented-, virtual-, and mixed-reality technologies for different purposes, including education, exhibition enhancement, exploration, reconstruction, and virtual museums. These technologies enable user-centred presentation and make cultural heritage digitally accessible, especially when physical access is constrained. A number of surveys of these emerging technologies have been conducted; however, they are either not domain specific or lack a holistic perspective in that they do not cover all the aspects of the technology. A review of these technologies from a cultural heritage perspective is therefore warranted. Accordingly, our article surveys the state-of-the-art in augmented-, virtual-, and mixed-reality systems as a whole and from a cultural heritage perspective. In addition, we identify specific application areas in digital cultural heritage and make suggestions as to which technology is most appropriate in each case. Finally, the article predicts future research directions for augmented and virtual reality, with a particular focus on interaction interfaces and explores the implications for the cultural heritage domain.

COMMISSION V, WG V/4KEY WORDS: semantic modeling, 3D accuracy, ontologies, historical architecture, reality based modeling, open source tools ABSTRACT:In order to improve the framework for 3D modeling, a great challenge is to obtain the suitability of Building Information Model (BIM) platform for historical architecture. A specific challenge in HBIM is to guarantee appropriateness of geometrical accuracy. The present work demonstrates the feasibility of a whole HBIM approach for complex architectural shapes, starting from TLS point clouds.A novelty of our method is to work in a 3D environment throughout the process and to develop semantics during the construction phase. This last feature of HBIM was analyzed in the present work verifying the studied ontologies, enabling the data enrichment of the model with non-geometrical information, such as historical notes, decay or deformation evidence, decorative elements etc. The case study is the Church of Santa Maria at Portonovo, an abbey from the Romanesque period. Irregular or complex historical architecture, such as Romanesque, needs the construction of shared libraries starting from the survey of its already existing elements. This is another key aspect in delivering Building Information Modeling standards. In particular, we focus on the quality assessment of the obtained model, using an open-source sw and the point cloud as reference. The proposed work shows how it is possible to develop a high quality 3D model semantic-aware, capable of connecting geometrical-historical survey with descriptive thematic databases. In this way, a centralized HBIM will serve as comprehensive dataset of information about all disciplines, particularly for restoration and conservation. Moreover, the geometric accuracy will ensure also reliable visualization outputs. * Corresponding author. This is useful to know for communication with the appropriate person in cases with more than one author.

In the Digital Cultural Heritage (DCH) domain, the semantic segmentation of 3D Point Clouds with Deep Learning (DL) techniques can help to recognize historical architectural elements, at an adequate level of detail, and thus speed up the process of modeling of historical buildings for developing BIM models from survey data, referred to as HBIM (Historical Building Information Modeling). In this paper, we propose a DL framework for Point Cloud segmentation, which employs an improved DGCNN (Dynamic Graph Convolutional Neural Network) by adding meaningful features such as normal and colour. The approach has been applied to a newly collected DCH Dataset which is publicy available: ArCH (Architectural Cultural Heritage) Dataset. This dataset comprises 11 labeled points clouds, derived from the union of several single scans or from the integration of the latter with photogrammetric surveys. The involved scenes are both indoor and outdoor, with churches, chapels, cloisters, porticoes and loggias covered by a variety of vaults and beared by many different types of columns. They belong to different historical periods and different styles, in order to make the dataset the least possible uniform and homogeneous (in the repetition of the architectural elements) and the results as general as possible. The experiments yield high accuracy, demonstrating the effectiveness and suitability of the proposed approach.

The number of distributed Photovoltaic (PV) plants that produce electricity has been significantly increased, and issue of monitoring and maintaining a PV plant has become of great importance and involves many challenges as efficiency, reliability, safety, and stability. This paper presents the novel approach to estimate the PV cells degradations with DCNNs. While many studies have performed images classification, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first exploitation of data acquired with a drone equipped with a thermal infrared sensor. The experiments on “Photovoltaic images Dataset”, a collected dataset, are presented to show the degradation problem and comprehensively evaluate the method presented in this research. Results in terms of precision, recall and F1-score show the effectiveness and the suitability of the proposed approach.

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> Cultural Heritage is a testimony of past human activity, and, as such, its objects exhibit great variety in their nature, size and complexity; from small artefacts and museum items to cultural landscapes, from historical building and ancient monuments to city centers and archaeological sites. Cultural Heritage around the globe suffers from wars, natural disasters and human negligence. The importance of digital documentation is well recognized and there is an increasing pressure to document our heritage both nationally and internationally. For this reason, the three-dimensional scanning and modeling of sites and artifacts of cultural heritage have remarkably increased in recent years. The semantic segmentation of point clouds is an essential step of the entire pipeline; in fact, it allows to decompose complex architectures in single elements, which are then enriched with meaningful information within Building Information Modelling software. Notwithstanding, this step is very time consuming and completely entrusted on the manual work of domain experts, far from being automatized. This work describes a method to label and cluster automatically a point cloud based on a supervised Deep Learning approach, using a state-of-the-art Neural Network called PointNet++. Despite other methods are known, we have choose PointNet++ as it reached significant results for classifying and segmenting 3D point clouds. PointNet++ has been tested and improved, by training the network with annotated point clouds coming from a real survey and to evaluate how performance changes according to the input training data. It can result of great interest for the research community dealing with the point cloud semantic segmentation, since it makes public a labelled dataset of CH elements for further tests.</p>

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During the last few years, there has been a growing exploitation of consumer-grade cameras allowing one to capture 360&amp;deg; images. Each device has different features and the choice should be entrusted on the use and the expected final output. The interest on such technology within the research community is related to its use versatility, enabling the user to capture the world with an omnidirectional view with just one shot. The potential is huge and the literature presents many use cases in several research domains, spanning from retail to construction, from tourism to immersive virtual reality solutions. However, the domain that could the most benefit is Cultural Heritage (CH), since these sensors are particularly suitable for documenting a real scene with architectural detail. Following the previous researches conducted by Fangi, which introduced its own methodology called Spherical Photogrammetry (SP), the aim of this paper is to present some tests conducted with the omni-camera Panono 360&amp;deg; which reach a final resolution comparable with a traditional camera and to validate, after almost ten years from the first experiment, its reliability for architectural surveying purposes. Tests have been conducted choosing as study cases <i>Santa Maria della Piazza</i> and <i>San Francesco alle scale Churches</i> in Ancona, Italy, since they were previously surveyed and documented with SP methodology. In this way, it has been possible to validate the accuracy of the new survey, performed by means an omni-camera, compared with the previous one for both outdoor and indoor scenario. The core idea behind this work is to validate if this new sensor can replace the standard image collection phase, speeding up the process, assuring at the same time the final accuracy of the survey. The experiment conducted demonstrate that, w.r.t. the SP methodology developed so far, the main advantage in using 360&amp;deg;&amp;thinsp;omni-directional cameras lies on increasing the rapidity of acquisition and panorama creation phases. Moreover, in order to foresee the implications that a wide adoption of fast and agile tools of acquisition could bring within the CH domain, points cloud have been generated with the same panoramas and visualized in a WEB application, to allow a result dissemination between the users.

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