In order to solve the current problems of single form and poor interactivity of intangible cultural heritage protection, research on digital protection and inheritance strategies of intangible cultural heritage based on artificial intelligence is proposed. Taking the protection of clay sculpture intangible cultural heritage as an example, this paper designs the main functional modules of the system cloud and mobile terminals, proposes a rapid modeling method based on a combination of three-dimensional scanning and grid iterative simplification, and uses ORB-FV and optical flow tracking algorithms to achieve online recognition of images. and tracking registration, complete system development based on Unity3D, and conduct experimental verification. The experimental results show that the total time taken by the system to complete image recognition, tracking registration and three-dimensional rendering is 36.5ms, which can meet the real-time system requirements of mobile augmented reality.