Multimodal monitoring of cultural heritage sites and the FIRESENSE project

Abstract

The FIRESENSE FP7 project aims to implement an automatic early warning system to remotely monitor areas of archaeological and cultural interest from the risk of fire and extreme weather conditions. This challenging task requires the operation of a multimodal wireless sensor network, the setting up of an infrastructure to publish and access sensor data and the fusion of multiple modalities in a real-time fashion. This paper discusses the multimodal sensor data access and fusion aspects of the project.

International Approaches to Climate Change and Cultural Heritage

“…Work within the information approach includes efforts to gather and foster relevant research and to connect it to efforts to address modern climate change (Guedes et al 2016; Rockman 2015). Applying these two approaches, impacts and information, to the four pillars of NPS climate-change response creates an eight-part concept framework for cultural heritage and climate change (Figure 1; Rockman 2015; Rockman et al 2016). The NPS developed the concepts listed within this framework iteratively for its Cultural Resources Climate Change Strategy (Rockman et al 2016) through consultations with natural and cultural resources specialists, facilities managers, and climate-change specialists within the NPS and with academic colleagues.…”

“…No one organization or institution will be able to engage in all the work necessary. A global effort with communication at its core is required for a majority of the issues to be addressed (Rockman et al 2016). This article contributes to this effort.…”

“…Within the United States, the NPS recognition of this threat is evident in its creation of the program for cultural resources within the NPS Climate Change Response Program and subsequent development of relevant policies and guidance (Markham et al 2016; Morgan et al 2016; National Park Service 2014; Rockman et al 2016; Schupp et al 2016). An overview of major cultural heritage and climate-change projects of other US federal agencies and NGO partners is included in Rockman et al (2016). Within the larger scientific community one of the most recent products in response to this threat is the Pocantico Call to Action on Climate Impacts and Cultural Heritage Declaration by the Union of Concerned Scientists, formulated in 2015 (Union of Concerned Scientists 2015).…”

“…This article restricts itself to non-US examples, and is the product of collaboration between the University of Maryland College Park, Anthropology Department and the US National Park Service (NPS) Climate Change Adaptation Coordinator for Cultural Resources. This collaboration aims to assist in the production of the NPS Cultural Resources Climate Change Strategy (Rockman et al 2016, see Goal 4: Learn and Share). One facet of this collaboration was to look out towards the rest of the world and take stock of what other national governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), cultural resource managers, and local communities were doing on the ground to help monitor, adapt to, mitigate against, and communicate about climate threats to cultural heritage.…”

New generation of automatic ground based wildfire surveillance systems

“…By combining probabilities of visual and thermal features, according to authors it is possible to detect fire at an early stage. Salah et al (Salah et al, 2011) describes an FP7 project dealing with protection of cultural heritage sites from the risk of fire and extreme weather conditions. The fire protection is provided using a fusion of information obtained from IR and visible images.…”