Recent years have witnessed a significant increase in efforts focused on digitally capturing and representing world heritage sites for preservation and access. The "UNESCO World Heritage Programme" (adopted in Nov. 1972) now has 851 listed sites, all considered as sites of "outstanding cultural or natural importance to the common heritage of humanity." Of these, 660 sites are cultural sites, 166 are natural and 25 have mixed properties.

Why are such preservation and digital access projects necessary? Unfortunately, many valuable objects that form part of our cultural heritage are being decayed by time, weathering and natural disasters. Other objects risk being lost through man-made disasters such as the Taliban's destruction of the great Bamiyan Buddha in Afghanistan, or the recent destruction by fire of a 600 years old South Gate in Seoul. Capturing digital representations such provides a means for preservation, access, and even scholarly study of these rich heritage sites and objects. World cultural heritage is not limited to physical sites and objects, but is intended to include Music, Languages, Dances, and Customs that are fast becoming extinct as the world moves toward a global village. Methods to digitally preserve, visualize, and analyze these more complex aspect of cultural heritage are also of great interest.

Computer vision research and practices have, and will continue, to play a center role in such cultural heritage preservation efforts. The First International Workshop on eHeritage and Digital Art Preservation aims to bring together Computer Vision researchers as well as interdisciplinary researcher that are related to computer vision in areas such as Computer Graphics, image and audio research, image and haptic (touch) research, as well as the presentation of visual content over wide web and education.

This one day workshop in conjunction with ICCV'09, solicits high-quality, previously unpublished, work related to Computer Vision (and related areas) that focus on eHeritage. Submissions are limited to 8-pages and should conform to the ICCV'09 submission requirements.

We are pleased to announce that all accepted papers to the eHeritage and Digital Art Preservation Workshop will be given the opportunity to be expanded for publication in a Special Issue of the International Journal on Computer Vision (IJCV).

In addition, the best paper award will be sponsored by Microsoft Research Asia.