This project is granted by Direktoratet for høyere utdanning og kompetanse (Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills).

Duration: 2025-2027

Project Description

The current problem of digitalization in culture heritage is that very few 3D digital models are manually generated while a lot of data has been collected. In further, these 3D models can only be used for visualization because they do not contain semantic and attribute information for analytical usages. In the domain of geomatics, people are good at automatically generating 3D digital models from multi-sourced geodata but have limited knowledge about culture heritage, hence could not design data models to integrate semantic and attribute features within 3D digital models.

In the education system at universities, culture heritage is a topic at faculty of social science while geomatics is a study program at faculty of engineering. There is no interaction between the two domains. This leads to the abovementioned problem, because students in culture heritage do not learn the techniques to process image and point clouds data for 3D digital modelling while students in geomatics do not have lectures or courses to learn the special characteristics of culture heritage objects in terms of geometries, semantics and attributes.

Nowadays, it is urgent to carry out digitalization in culture heritage for protection and restoration purposes because material culture heritages haven been under threaten of nature disasters (i.e. landslides, flooding, wildfire, etc.) and erosions, giving the evidence of global warming and climate change in the recent decades.    

The aim of this project is to establish a joint platform and educational base to train professionals with technical skills and specific knowledge for the task of generating and utilizing digital twins (3D digital models) of culture heritage in the response to global warming and climate change.

We are gathering experts from the related domains (geomatics, archaeology, history, and culture heritage) to organize lectures, training courses, workshops and field trips for the purpose of digitalization in culture heritage. A team from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and the Trondheim Municipality is going to work with a team at the Beijing University of Civil and Architectural Engineering and Anyue Institute of Grotto Research in China to accomplish the education tasks in this project.

Both sides have complementary advantages to each other. While the Norwegian side is good at 3D modelling techniques, GIS spatial analysis and visualization, the Chinese partner is strong in data acquisition and geodata management. In the domain of culture heritage, our partners will bring knowledge with western and eastern cultural and historical background together.

The collaboration will take advantages of educational resources from both sides with the long-termed aim of joint master and PhD programs. In further, taking Trondheim and Anyue as two experimental bases will give students opportunities to use digitalization technology in both western and eastern culture heritages.

Collaborators

Project coordinator: Professor Hongchao Fan

Participation from Norwegian Side:

1. The Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at NTNU
2. the Department of Archaeology and Cultural History at NTNU
3. NTNU Museum
4. Department of Surveying, Mapping and Architecture at Trondheim Municipality

Project partner and coordinator in China: Miaole Hou

Participation from Chinese Side:

1. the School of Geomatics and Urban Information at BUCAE (Beijing University of Civil and Architecture Engineering)
2. Anyue Institute of Grotto Research
3. Beijing Digsur Science & Technology Com. Ltd