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 often serve as the first line of defense in assessing structural integrity before events of serious deterioration. These inspections are conducted either through direct eye observation by professionals or with the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI)–based object detection algorithms that identify anomalies in the image/video data. The combination of information and communication technology (ICT), virtual reality (VR), and AI-assisted inspections enables automation processes and immersive quality is provided by VR systems. This paper presents a review of immersive technologies for building and infrastructure inspections with a more focused discussion on the integration of 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 methodological and procedural aspects that could, in the future, be developed in line with the main trends emerging from the previous review and case-oriented literature studies. The paper also outlines the 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 and integration.