KEYNOTE
Aerospace Technologies and Artificial Intelligence for the Protection of Cultural Heritage.
Giuseppe Marseglia
Comando Carabinieri Tutela Patrimonio Culturale, Italy
ABSTRACT
Remote sensing by satellite and/or drone, in synergy with GIS (Geographic Information System) systems, is a fundamental tool for obtaining information (even in real time) on immovable cultural heritage, useful to all actors involved in the protection and safeguarding, but also in the enhancement, of the national cultural heritage and in particular of the archaeological cultural heritage. This type of remote sensing (satellite/drone), through hyperspectral and multispectral imaging, aerial photogrammetry and geospatial analysis, is a valid tool for the surveillance and monitoring of our cultural heritage.
The illicit trafficking of cultural heritage is currently countered by the personnel of the Carabinieri Command for the Protection of Cultural Heritage (CC TPC), engaged daily in the control of the thousands of data and information available on the web or provided by the other Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs), with the support of the computer systems and archives developed by the CC TPC Command over the last decades.
In Leonardo TPC, the IT system used by the CC TPC to store all the activities carried out for ensuring the protection of cultural heritage, more than 7M objects are contained are surveyed and of these, 1.3 M are to be searched, constituting the Italian stolen works of art database; it is therefore an enormous amount of information that is difficult to manage and consult.
However, the increasingly frequent use of electronic channels, instead of traditional ones, for the illicit trade or export abroad of suspicious cultural goods, makes it necessary to have IT tools, constantly evolved and perfected, such as to speed up the number of checks carried out, through automatic search procedures and "smart" search algorithms.
On the basis of these considerations, a design solution was born (Project n.114.5.1 – Co-financed by EU ISF Program 2014-2020) that consists, on the one hand, in the creation of a new system called S.W.O.A.D.S. (Stolen Works Of Art Detection System), for the search and identification of stolen works of art and, on the other hand, in the evolution of the existing system through substantial evolutionary implementation of its main software components, necessary to obtain better results from the interaction with SWOADS.
SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY
- Lieutenant Colonel Commander of the Carabinieri TPC Group for Central Northern Italy
- Graduated in Classical Literature from the University of Padua and in Conservation of Cultural Heritage from the University of Viterbo.
- Specialized in Archaeology at the Specialization School of Syracuse.
- Employed for 25 years in the TPC, as commander of the regional units in Turin, Palermo, Venice.
- Employee in multiple international missions for the Protection of Cultural Heritage, including Iraq, Jordan, Libya, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, Ecuador, North Macedonia.