Intangible cultural heritage is the precipitation of civilization in the process of human development and the inheritance of people’s generational spirit. The study focuses on the application of 3D modeling technology in cultural genetic protection, innovatively proposes a 3D point cloud edge extraction algorithm based on Gaussian mapping clustering, using K-nearest neighbor search, Gaussian mapping and K-means clustering algorithms to realize the extraction of edge features of the mural paintings of the tombs, in order to assist the restoration of the mural paintings and the protection of inheritance. Through the experiments on the public dataset and the tomb chamber mural dataset, it is found that the results of this paper’s method are better than the comparison method in all three indexes, and the ODS, OIS and AP values of this paper’s method are improved by 2.19%, 0.95% and 1.78% in the public dataset, and 3.35%, 4.05% and 5.24% in the tomb chamber mural dataset, respectively. In addition, the edge extraction results on the sample of tomb chamber murals also confirm the effectiveness and efficiency of the method. The results show that the proposed method has a positive effect on the digital preservation and subsequent restoration of cultural heritage.
