Application of remote sensing in management of cultural heritage. Project Report 2010

The project was started in 2002 with the overall aim of developing a cost-effective method for surveying and monitoring cultural heritage sites on a regional and national scale. The project focuses on the development of automated pattern recognition methods for detecting and locating cultural heritage sites. The working assumption is that cultural heritage sites with no visual apparent manifestations above ground may be detectable in satellite images due toalterations in the spectral signature of the bare soil or of uniform vegetation growing there (crops). A software prototype, CultSearcher, has been developed to provide computerized assistance in the analysis of satellite images. In particular, the software marks possible sites for further inspection by an archaeologist. This note describes the achievements of the project during 2010. With the new satellite Worldview-2, we were able to make many new acquisitions of multispectral satellite images of 0.5 m resolution. In these images, the software CultSearcher was able to detect several ringshaped crop marks and soil marks, many of which are likely to be previously unknown leveled grave mounds. The CultSearcher software has been enhanced in three major ways: (1) fewer false detections are made, (2) it can make detections in aerial orthophoto of ground resolution 10-60 cm, and (3) it can detect pitfall traps in lidar height measurements, provided the point density is sufficiently high.