Recently, in a spacious area outside the Pingmen Gate of the Xi'an Ming City Wall, a team of Professor Wang Huiqin and her students from Xi'an University of Architecture and Technology are operating drones to conduct a thorough "health check" on the city wall, following pre-defined sections.
This work has been ongoing for several months. The vast database of thousands of images will serve as crucial evidence for the prevention and treatment of future damages to the city wall.
In 2023, this innovative team achieved significant success in the conservation and restoration project of the mural at the Dule Temple in Jizhou, Tianjin. The Dule Temple mural, a millennium-old artistic treasure, has long faced challenges such as color fading and blurred details. Facing this challenge, Professor Wang Huiqin's team digitized this precious mural in its entirety and "transferred" it into computers. They devised a comprehensive digital photography collection plan and utilized multispectral imaging equipment for high-precision capture. Through image registration technology and deep learning algorithms, they solved the stitching problem of thousands of images taken from different angles, achieving high-precision digitization of large-scale murals. They also successfully identified the types of pigments, the condition of damages, and hidden historical information with precision, providing a scientific basis for the protection and restoration of the murals.
Multispectral Imaging in Mural Art.
The original murals on the east wall of the Dule Temple.
The murals on the east wall of the Dule Temple are divided into sections.
The Dunhuang Temple East Wall Fresco Near-Infrared Multispectral Imaging Data.
Building upon the integrity of the multispectral image data of the frescoes, the team further conducted research on extracting cultural relics' outlines and discovering hidden information. Through multispectral imaging technology, the team successfully virtually extracted the outlines and obtained spectral information of the pigments in the frescoes under different wavelengths. These findings not only reveal the painting techniques and styles of ancient Chinese frescoes but also rapidly identify some commonly used pigments in ancient painted cultural relics, providing strong support for the protection and restoration project of the Dunhuang Temple frescoes and the Bodhisattva.
The classification and identification of pigments in the full-length mural on the south wall of the Dule Temple. The images are all provided by the research team.
In recent years, Professor Wang Huiqin's team has made significant achievements in the detection, analysis, preservation, and restoration of cultural relics. The team, in collaboration with professional units such as the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics Protection, has authored works such as "Digital Restoration Technology of Collection Tomb Mural" and applied for more than 20 patents. Additionally, the team has participated in several national cultural relic protection projects, such as the sorting and research of bone inscriptions unearthed from the Weiyang Palace in the Han Dynasty's Chang'an City, and the research on the assessment system and protection technology of weathering diseases of grotto relics, providing important scientific basis for cultural relic protection.
It is reported that they will also conduct research in the direction of intelligent detection and unmanned inspection of cultural relics, gradually realizing the multi-dimensional and multi-element information organization, knowledge discovery, and cognition-driven of cultural relics. Ultimately, they aim to achieve the leap from single-platform to multi-platform technology in digital protection, meeting the significant demands for national cultural relic protection, display, and utilization.
