VALUE: Visual Analysis for Location and Understanding of Environment

Michele Mazzamuto, Daniele Di Mauro, Francesco Ragusa, Irene D'Ambra, Andrea Sciuto, Angelo Aiello, Flavio Licandro, Ignazio Infantino, Antonino Furnari, Giovanni Signorello, Giovanni Maria Farinella

Abstract: Cultural sites, such as museums and monuments, are popular tourist destinations worldwide, attracting visitors eager to explore the culture, history, and art of specific regions or countries. However, traditional visiting approaches may limit many cultural sites, failing to fully engage visitors. This challenge motivates the development of intelligent systems that integrate computer vision techniques and mixed reality to enhance cultural heritage visits. In this context, we propose VALUE, a mixed reality application designed for cultural environments, offering benefits for both the visitor and the museum manager. Utilizing egocentric image analysis and signals such as gaze, facilitated by the use of smart glasses, VALUE provides visitors with immersive and augmented visiting experiences. It guides them within the museum towards their selected artworks, enabling virtual interaction with observed elements and communication with a virtual guide through voice commands and body movements. For museum managers, VALUE offers analysis of visitor behavior for cultural and commercial proposals, and identification of the most frequented paths. Experiments show that the proposed approaches achieve satisfactory results for cultural heritage attended object detection and visitors localization.