Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence-Assisted Visual Inspections for Cultural Heritage Structures: A Review

Visual inspections are essential for the preservation of cultural heritage (CH) structures and oftenserve as the first line of defense in assessing structural integrity before events of serious deteriora-tion. These inspections are conducted either through direct eye observation by professionals orwith the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI)–based object detection algorithms that identifyanomalies in the image/video data. The combination of information and communication technol-ogy (ICT), virtual reality (VR), and AI-assisted inspections enables automation processes andimmersive quality is provided by VR systems. This paper presents a review of immersive technol-ogies for building and infrastructure inspections with a more focused discussion on the integrationof AI–VR for cultural heritage inspection and diagnosis. A case study of the Vistarino Palace in Pavia,Italy, presents a VR-based and expert-driven visual inspection, which is used to clarify methodo-logical and procedural aspects that could, in the future, be developed in line with the main trendsemerging from the previous review and case-oriented literature studies. The paper also outlinesthe respective advantages along with their limitations of manual, smart AI-based sensing, and VR-assisted visual inspections, and discusses future research directions for their development andintegration