Application of satellite data in management of cultural heritage. Project Report 2008

This report describes the achievements of the project during 2008. The CultSearcher software has been tested on many agricultural areas in Vestfold County. This has given a broader overview of potential obstacles and important experience for further development of the ring detection algorithms. Some improvements have been implemented in the user interface as well as the detection algorithm, the latter in order to increase the number of detections of real crop and soil marks as well as reducing the number of detections of non‐interesting marks. Also, an approach for making a frequency map of potential cultural heritage in agricultural fields (‘probability maps’) has been developed and tested out for a region in Vestfold County. Since there is interest in the methodological approach of CultSearcher in other county administrations as well, a dialogue has been established with Sør‐Trøndelag and Oppland County Administrations. The 2008 project was led by the Norwegian Computing Center (Norsk Regnesentral, NR), who carried out the project under a contract with the Norwegian Directorate
for Cultural Heritage (Riksantikvaren, RA), who funded the project. The user side was represented by the Vestfold County Administration (Vestfold fylkeskommune) and the
Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research (Norsk Institutt for Kulturminneforskning, NIKU).