Introduction
The preservation of artistic, archaeological and architectural heritage represents a bench mark of the cultural development of a society. To this end it is necessary the conservation of the material components and the knowledge of those values (historical, artistic, symbolical etc) which represent the intangible aspect of the cultural heritage. These two aims can be reached by means of a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approach which allows to provide information on materials, state of conservation and building techniques.
To do this in the past the only way was based on destructive surveys. Today an increased awareness of the cultural value and the brittleness of artefacts and monuments to be restored do not allow anymore destructive investigations.
This favoured the use of not invasive techniques based on near surface geophysics and emerging sensing techniques.


Session
The session proposal is aimed at presenting the state of art and novel instrumentation, sensing techniques, as well as data processing approaches to support the study and conservation strategies of the historical built heritage, monuments and artistic (movable) artefacts, such as sculptures, paintings and frescoes.
As well known, for the correct restoration of the architectural and artistic heritage an exhaustive knowledge of their status is necessary; such information stands not only in the identification of the building and material features, but also in the localization, survey and characterization of decay pathologies.
Furthermore, in many cases monitoring of the structure and the surface is required, for all kind of cultural artefacts (historical monuments to artistic frescoes) in order to foresee the degradation temporal behaviour.
In this field, in the recent years there has been an increasing interesting on non-destructive and non invasive geophysical test methods that also allow to overcome the subjectivity arising in the choice of the number and the positions where to perform the destructive tests. Thus, the non invasive techniques are able to give a global vision of the heritage.
In addition, very recently large attention is posed to the integration of the classical geophysical techniques with new emerging surface and subsurface sensing techniques (optical sensors, thermography, acoustics) for a multi depth, multi-resolution, multi-scale monitoring.

Therefore, the sessions will be concerned with:

a) The state of art and progress of the geophysical techniques (self-potential, ERT, GPR) in the framework of the Cultural Heritage diagnostics with a focus on the novelty of the instrumentation and data acquisition/processing techniques as well as on the presentation of experimentations/applications of high cultural interest and/or of challenging scientific interest;
b) The presentation of approaches based on the integration of geophysical techniques, stress wave tests (sonic and ultrasonic), infrared thermography for the conservation and the study of building features of monuments
c) Diagnostics for the study and conservation of artistic artefacts (paintings, sculptures, architectural decorations) based on hyperspectral and multispectral imagery, infrared reflectography, infrared thermography and other high frequencies electromagnetic techniques
d) Integration of GPR, stress wave tests with chemical and physical analyses for the characterization of materials and constructive techniques of monuments and artefacts;
e) Techniques of high resolution digital seismic noise measurement for the identification of resonance frequencies of historical buildings.
f) Active (SAR, lidar) and passive (traditional aerial image to multispectral/ hyperspectral data) satellite and airborne data processing for conservation, monitoring and risk prevention of cultural heritage.

Solicited people: Mara Camaiti, m.camaiti@icvbc.cnr.it