The Drohobych community has completed a large-scale project to digitize 55 cemeteries using drones and artificial intelligence technologies to recognize inscriptions on tombstones. Thanks to this, users can find graves by surname from a smartphone or computer and view routes to them.
The Drohobych community has completed a large-scale project to digitize 55 cemeteries using drones and artificial intelligence technologies to recognize inscriptions on tombstones. Thanks to this, users can find graves by surname from a smartphone or computer and view routes to them.
This is reported by "Suspilne Lviv". It is noted that the developer of the MemoriaMap service was Oleg Lekhush, a veteran of the Russian-Ukrainian war.
The work lasted from the end of 2025 to the summer of 2026. During this time, aerial photography was conducted on territories with a total area of 109 hectares, orthophoto maps were created and about 70 thousand tombstones with GPS coordinates were recorded. Artificial intelligence recognized the inscriptions on the monuments, after which unclear data was checked manually. As a result, full names were established for 86% of the burials, as some of the information was lost due to wear and tear of the materials.
"We recognized all the inscriptions that could be recognized. It turned out that about 10% of the inscriptions were lost or partially lost. There is a cross, but there is no plaque, or there is a plaque, but the inscription has been erased. And what is interesting, there are such cases even among the burials of 2025," said Oleg Lekhush during the presentation of the project at the city council.
The new platform combines digital accounting for the utility and a public online service for residents. Users can find graves by surname from a smartphone or computer and view directions to them. In addition, the system allows for analysis of demographic data and life expectancy over time.
Previously, digital burial registers in Ukraine were implemented mainly for individual locations in large cities or military memorials. The Drohobych community became the first to integrate all city and rural cemeteries into a single digital system at the same time.
The Zhady digital memorialization service has appeared in Ukraine - a platform that allows you to create online pages of memory of the deceased and link them to real burials via QR codes.
