Recent years have witnessed a great increase in the interest in digitally capturing and representing world heritage sites for preservation and access. The "UNESCO World Heritage Programme" 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 these preservation and digital access projects necessary? Unfortunately, many valuable objects that form part of our Cultural Heritage have been decayed by time, weathering, man-made or natural disasters. Capturing digital representations provides mechanism for preservation, as well as access, and even scholarly study.

Even if we had not faced the challenge of preservation, we would still face a problem of accessibility. Most of these sites are out of reach to most people. A significant amount of archeological and art objects are carefully kept in museums cellars and are not displayed. Digital acquisition and display of Cultural Heritage, art, historical and archeological objects can assist preserving their original look, in case something happens to them. This can assist restoration efforts, and can significantly enhance the ability of people all over the work to view and enjoy them.

Computer Vision, Graphics, and Multimedia research and practices have, and will continue, to play a center role in Cultural Heritage preservation efforts. The Second Workshop on eHeritage and Digital Art Preservation aims to bring together these researches as well as interdisciplinary researches that are related to these areas, in particular image and audio research, image and haptic (touch) research, as well as presentation of visual content over wide web and education. This workshop will follow the very successful First eHeritage Workshop which was held in conjunction with ICCV in Kyoto last year.

We are glad to announce that extended versions of selected best papers from eHeritage are going to be published by ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage (JOCCH).