Technologies and tools for the beneficial diagnosis and preservation of TANGIBLE cultural heritage

2013-2015. JPI – JHEP – Joint Pilot Transnational Call for Joint Research Projects in Cultural Heritage

Partenaires : GeoImaging Ltd (CY), 3D Target (IT), CNRS (UMR MAP avec CICRP), FIDETIA (SP)

Responsable au sein du MAP  : Livio De Luca

Résumé : Tangible cultural assets are generally located in large open-air sites or situated in a closed and controlled space, like for instance museums, private collections or restoration  workshops. However, valuable heritage objects undergo a number of different external stresses which are crucial to be addressed. Variations of the local environment, such as changes in urban pollutants, temperature, humidity, etc., can cause relevant alteration of the state of conservation of heritage objects. The principal challenge for TANGIBLE is to identify and understand the different types of external causes that affect movable and tangible cultural heritage and need to be controlled in order to succeed in its safe conservation, preservation
and sustainable management. Such identification leads to the inspection of the impact of environmental changes on the actual status of preservation. All these effects to tangible cultural assets necessitate improved methods, technologies and tools for their quantification in order to achieve more accurate risk assessment, diagnosis, documentation, monitoring and conservation of movable cultural assets. The high costs of maintenance of indoor and outdoor heritage directly enforce the prioritization of the monitoring and conservation policies so as to ensure a sustainable protection. The thorough knowledge of each examined art object will also yield quicker authentication and traceability of cultural assets, improve management
and also enhance the mobility of cultural collections in Europe. In order to meet these goals, advanced methods, sensors, tools and special state-of-the-art technologies are going to be used and developed by the interdisciplinary partners of the TANGIBLE project to evaluate and track the state of preservation on a wide range of cultural heritage objects in indoor and outdoor scenarios. Therefore, the impact of environmental changes will be analysed and proper risk parameters will be assessed in order to ensure their safe conservation and sustainable management. Contrary to other approaches, TANGIBLE is proposing the realization of a toolbox, i.e. a set of different sensors and relevant software modules to handle the monitoring, documentation and preservation of heritage objects. An advanced and hybrid multi-sensor system (based on 1D, 2D and 3D technologies) will allows end-users and heritage people to get quick, reliable, non-destructive and affordable solutions to study periodically the state of conservation of art objects. The developed system, based on the collected and processed data, will alarm whenever any diagnostic parameter is altered on any of the surveyed art objects. TANGIBLE will rely on an interdisciplinary and international consortium in order to exploit expertise in the field of sensors, 3D modelling, conservation and preservation.