Zhejiang launches national artificial intelligence application pilot base to empower ancient building protection and cultural tourism industry

China News Service, Hangzhou, September 5 (Cao Dan) Just upload a picture or take an aerial photo, and the system can automatically identify diseases, deformations and other problems of ancient buildings and generate repair suggestions - this scenario is becoming a reality in Zhejiang.

With the country's first national artificial intelligence application pilot base for the cultural tourism field (hereinafter referred to as the "pilot base") officially launched in Hangzhou, Zhejiang in May, the in-depth integration of cultural relics protection and artificial intelligence has entered a period of acceleration.

Currently, Zhejiang is taking the "Eight Projects" of cultural construction as the guide, with the goal of accelerating the construction of a high-level cultural province, and setting up eight runways of "casting soul, speaking out, inheriting, developing industry, benefiting people, managing network, eliminating risks, and gathering people".

Among them, "Industrial Runway" shoulders the important task of doing a good job in humanistic economic articles, prospering and developing cultural undertakings and cultural industries, and accelerating the construction of pilot bases and consolidating the foundation of intelligent bases such as computing power, data, models, and scenarios is one of the important projects.

For a long time, grassroots cultural relics protection has generally relied on the traditional model of "field surveys + paper archives + manual inspections", which has shortcomings such as extensive information recording, lagging data updates, and difficulty in implementing dynamic monitoring. Faced with the objective reality that immovable cultural relics across the country are “multiple, wide-ranging, and scattered”, how to improve protection efficiency and coverage has become an urgent problem that the industry needs to solve.

Lu Yuanzheng, chairman of the Zhejiang Ancient Architecture Design and Research Institute Co., Ltd., used a vivid metaphor: "Protecting cultural relics is like seeing a doctor. Different ages and different 'diseases' require different treatment methods. Increasingly sophisticated scientific research methods can better help us solve the problem of cultural relics protection."

Relying on more than 40 years of professional accumulation and data resources of the Zhejiang Ancient Building Design and Research Institute, the pilot base is building the country's largest ancient building gene bank, which currently contains more than 40,000 ancient building data.

Based on a special data set, an intelligent agent called the "Health Doctor" of ancient buildings is undergoing pilot verification in Hangzhou, Shaoxing and other places. This agent can transform expert experience into minute-level intelligent diagnosis capabilities, effectively making up for the shortcomings of grassroots cultural protection professionals.

It is understood that the pilot base will build an integrated external operation portal around the overall structure of "1+4+5+N", focusing on the four key areas of cultural protection, cultural production, cultural communication, and cultural tourism integration, and building five functional centers of computing power, data, models, applications, and scenario verification. Facing diverse market entities and social needs, it will unite ecological partners to jointly build N intelligent and characteristic application scenarios.

The goal of the pilot base is to build 20 high-quality corpora and multiple industry and vertical models by 2028 to create an ecosystem that deeply integrates artificial intelligence and cultural tourism.

In response to industry bottlenecks such as ambiguous cultural data copyrights, poor circulation, and difficulty in releasing value, the pilot base has built a copyright protection and data trading pilot platform, using blockchain technology to achieve full-link traceability of transaction rights protection, and establishing systems such as rights confirmation, authorization, and revenue distribution, aiming to make high-quality cultural data "dare to be open, tradable, and able to add value."

It is worth mentioning that the digital assets of the ancient building gene bank have begun to extend to the industrial side.

According to reports, the pilot base has reached cooperation intentions with Qunhe Technology, NetEase's "Guitang", etc. Through the application of ancient architecture-related data sets, it can significantly shorten the research and development modeling cycle in the fields of games, animation, virtual photography and other fields, and solve pain points such as the high cost of restoring ancient themes and the easy inaccuracy of historical details.

At present, the pilot base is fully promoting the construction, promoting application pilot verification in a public and market-oriented manner, accelerating the incubation of new scenes and new formats in the cultural industry, promoting new cultural consumption, and creating an innovation highland where artificial intelligence, cultural construction, and industrial development are deeply integrated.