Acoustic Sensor Data Flow for Cultural Heritage Monitoring and Safeguarding

Cultural heritage sites, apart from being the tangible link to a country’s history and culture, actively contribute to the national economy, offering a foundation upon which cultural tourism can develop. This importance at the cultural and economic level, advocates for the need for preservation of cultural heritage sites for the future generations. To this end, advanced monitoring systems harnessing the power of sensors are deployed near the sites to collect data which can fuel systems and processes aimed at protection and preservation. In this paper we present the use of acoustic sensors for safeguarding cultural sites located in rural or urban areas, based on a novel data flow framework. We developed and deployed Wireless Acoustic Sensors Networks that record audio signals, which are transferred to a modular cloud platform to be processed using an efficient deep learning algorithm (f1-score: 0.838) to identify audio sources of interest for each site, taking into account the materials the assets are made of. The extracted information is presented exploiting the designed STORM Audio Signal ontology and then fused with spatiotemporal information using semantic rules. The results of this work give valuable insight to the cultural experts and are publicly available using the Linked Open Data format.