Preserving family album photos with the HoloLens 2

Following the leap set by the introduction of digital photography and spread of social media, the custom of creating and nourishing a family photo album is steadily declining. The feeling of waving goodbye to an old technology may hence explain why collectors and museums are increasingly searching for such type of photographs. In such scenario, a barrier set to the preservation and analysis of the enormous source of information is the unavailability of a fine-grained digitization and cataloguing infrastructure. An opportunity to resolve such issue is offered by augmented reality (AR): we envision an AR-application capable of individuating and segmenting photos, while browsing through a family album. In addition to this digitization step, we also include a second one where the digitized images are analyzed, tagging them with meta-data pertaining their presumed socio-historical context and their date. The addition of such meta-data is key not only from a cataloguing point of view, but also from a conservation perspective. In fact, analog photos are more often preserved when some information pertaining their subject and their date is known. To this aim, we experiment the use of the HoloLens 2 along with artificial intelligence paradigms.