Review of research on digital protection and application of cultural heritage

China boasts a rich and diverse array of both tangible and intangible cultural heritage. Today, the use of digital technologies for the modeling, preservation, and presentation of cultural heritage has become a research hotspot in the fields of cultural heritage conservation, as well as in related areas such as computer graphics and computer vision. The Cultural Heritage Digitization National-Local Joint Engineering Research Center at Northwest University conducts research in five key areas: 3D modeling equipment for cultural relics from the three dynasties, smart museum construction, virtual restoration of ceramic artifacts, the restoration of ancient human faces, and the intelligent media fusion for holographic performances of Qin Opera. However, due to the fundamental differences between tangible and intangible cultural heritage, many challenges arise in areas such as modeling methods, restoration and preservation technologies, and presentation forms. These specific challenges include: ① Existing digital modeling equipment for cultural relics is inefficient and requires significant human intervention. ② The wide variety of cultural relics, with their complex features, diverse shapes, and rich semantics, necessitates the development of knowledge extraction and knowledge graph construction methods tailored to Chinese cultural relics for efficient organization and presentation. ③ Research on the shape representation, description methods, and automatic recombination of damaged relic fragments. ④ Virtual restoration of ancient human faces, including gender and racial recognition. ⑤ Holographic performance technology faces challenges such as high computational power demands, the accuracy of the fusion of art and technology, hardware compatibility, real-time processing, immersion, and interactivity, while also needing to address cultural differences and audience acceptance issues. In response to these needs and technical challenges, this paper first reviews the relevant literature from recent years, then summarizes a series of achievements by the Cultural Heritage Digitization National-Local Joint Engineering Research Center at Northwest University, and finally discusses future research directions in the field of cultural heritage digitization.