A Modern Approach to Ancient Building Monitoring: Non-Contact Vision Technology in Practice

Protection of ancient buildings requires high-precision dynamic monitoring on the premise of no damage and no interference. Wooden tower structures, represented by the Yingxian Wooden Pagoda, show displacement responses under long-term wind load, foundation settlement and environmental changes. Haythamvisual tracker based on oblique optical-axis imaging and passive target recognition, achieves millimeter-level structural response measurement without touching the tower body.

The system is deployed on a fixed tower base, continuously capturing images through long-distance cameras and analyzing the horizontal and vertical displacement of the tower finial and nodes. Combined with temperature/humidity sensing and image correction algorithms, it runs stably under morning fog, strong light and wind-sand conditions, ensuring data continuity and reliability. Data is uploaded via the cloud platform and stored long-term for trend analysis and threshold warning.

This non-contact solution has been successfully applied in multiple historical building monitoring scenarios, providing heritage management units with visible and traceable condition management capability, introducing modern digital protection while preserving the original appearance of the buildings.