A New Portable Spectral Camera System for the Cultural Heritage Conservation Market

Project Information

XPECAM

Grant agreement ID: 811764

DOI

10.3030/811764

Project closed

EC signature date 24 April 2018

Start date 1 May 2018

End date 31 July 2020

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Innovation In SMEs

Total cost

€ 1 267 125,00

EU contribution

€ 886 987,50

Coordinated by

SIGNINUM GESTAO DE PATRIMONIO CULTURAL LDA
Portugal

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - XPECAM (A New Portable Spectral Camera System for the Cultural Heritage Conservation Market)

Reporting period: 2019-05-01 to 2020-07-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Precision conservation and restoration requires support by costly analytic services and instrumentation. Curators are obliged to buy expensive instruments which are large and/or heavy and require specialized knowledge to use them, or to request the support of a scientific laboratory, which increases the time and effort of the curators and elevates significantly the final cost for the customer/collector.
Nowadays, technology has advanced to a point where the price of hardware has dropped significantly, and software has evolved to a point where automation can be performed easier. XpeCAM empowers the Art Conservator by increasing productivity, knowledge, quality and speed of a restoration process (allowing to cut costs). The high-quality conservation work that was reserved only for first class art works is now becoming available and affordable for new market segments.
It will allow professionals to harvest new business opportunities and grow their market, by reaching new clients that want to preserve cultural heritage. This is a disruptive approach to the conservation services that can bring new markets for cultural heritage SMEs, which is in line with best practices for cultural heritage site preservation.
Being more than a portable spectral imaging system, the XpeCAM X02 project aims to develop a technological platform providing an integrated and collaborative technological solution – of hardware and cloud platform – that could extract important information both from the visible and the invisible. By integrating the Internet of Things (IoT) within the XpeCAM Platform it will be possible to connect any XpeCAM device with Internet to exchange multiple types of data. The collected data from the artwork pieces will be easily combined, correlated, compared and merged to match the conservator’s needs and requirements. The connectivity, sensing, and interactivity of all XpeCAM devices will be the platform’s main features enabling a collaborative and shared environment towards Cultural Heritage preservation and conservation community.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Up to now, XpeCAM X02 Platform has already matured its ability to capture and acquire the spectral cube data in an automatic way with the immediate upload to a cloud environment for user manipulation.
This new reality and spectral data exploitation have been disseminated through the project social media channels (Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and twitter) and spread out by project’s key partners and the European Commission. It has been an amazing opportunity, being able to participate and organize key events (workshops, conferences, fairs, specialized training sessions and other events of different nature) all over the European Union and India, present XpeCAM X02 and the disruptive approach it is bringing to such a conservative sector as Cultural Heritage conservation and preservation is!
The SME Instrument - Overseas Trade Fairs (OTF) and the EASME ScaleUp EU teams have provided crucial assistance to XpeCAM X02 dissemination by attending key events such as international fairs (Electronica and Productronica in India), brokerage and pitching events, but also by disseminating the project in all EU social media channels. The experience gained through our international presence and pitching opportunities made even clearer that the XpeCAM X02 project will make a significant contribution in the Cultural Heritage market, generating interest as an investment opportunity. Being accepted to become part of the European Investment Project Portal (EIPP 20180886) was also an important milestone achieved and key communication vehicle for the project towards potential investors.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

XpeCAM X02 is developing beyond the state-of-the-art in the documentation of Cultural Heritage objects both through hardware and software. It will result in an innovative spectral imaging solution with novel features as: (a) portability; (b) unique design; (c) user friendliness; (d) automation; (e) measurement quality, and (f) intelligent analytics. By the end of the project, the XpeCAM X02 platform is expected to be the state of the art on technological innovation used in the Cultural Heritage conservation market, redefining the standards of object documentation. It is anticipated that the XpeCAM platform will be constantly used in the everyday work of conservation scientists, art historians, museum curators, and collectors. Through its social capabilities, multiple new applications will be developed enabling the communication and discussions between professionals from different disciplines.
Culture is the reference of our past, of where we have come from. Its protection, preservation, and promotion are critical to guarantee our present and future identity as a person, city or nation. Further, Cultural Heritage has proven to hold an important role in today’s tourism industry. This fact is bringing more preservation challenges to that same Cultural Heritage, since today’s mass tourism is endangering even more our unique artefacts all over the world.
Novel diagnostic solutions, like XpeCAM X02 platform, are considered potentially critical to this present challenge to assure efficient preservation of Cultural Heritage, and are seen today as the key factor to guarantee the future preservation of our European identity and also to help understand it better.
During XpeCAM X02 dissemination activities the expressed interest from the specialized public attending the several events and workshops related to Spectral Imaging in Art Conservation has increased. Technicians as Art conservators are demanding more and more solutions as they start to understand the technology behind it and how it can help them to understand better their object of work and to control their conservation intervention.

X02 Camera

LAMPA

XO2 Platform

Collecting data

X02 at work