Digital Longmen Project: A Free Walking VR System with Image-Based Restoration

Located in China’s ancient capital Luoyang, Longmen Grottoes are one of the finest examples of Buddhist stone carving art. Nowadays, many caves do not have public access due to heritage preservation. In order to let people appreciate these relics, we setup a VR system with smartphones and helmets based on scanned models and textures. Motion capture system is also utilized to make the viewpoint not fixed so that users can walk freely as if in the cave. Moreover, since some sculptures have been heavily damaged, we propose a digital restoration framework to enhance exhibition contents. The framework includes general and detailed restoration from a single old image by shape from shading and landmark driven mesh deformation respectively. In practice, we develop this system for the representative Middle Binyang Cave, with interactions such as gesture recognition exploited to provide satisfactory user experience, which can ease the conflict between tourism and preservation.