1. Automatic detection of burial mounds (kurgans) in the Altai Mountains
- Author
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Wenbo Xu, Rui Zhou, Jian Yang, Jean Bourgeois, Xingzhuang Chen, Tim Van de Voorde, Wouter Gheyle, Rudi Goossens, Fen Chen, Geography, Earth System Sciences, and Cartography and Geographical Information Science
- Subjects
010504 meteorology & atmospheric sciences ,0211 other engineering and technologies ,object detection ,02 engineering and technology ,Permafrost ,Field survey ,01 natural sciences ,Archaeology ,Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics ,Object detection ,Remote sensing archaeology ,Computer Science Applications ,Stone mounds ,Altai Mountains ,Computers in Earth Sciences ,Kurgans ,Engineering (miscellaneous) ,Geology ,021101 geological & geomatics engineering ,0105 earth and related environmental sciences - Abstract
The Altai Mountains are one of the most impressive and valuable archaeological areas in the world. Kurgans (burial mounds) of ancient civilizations, which are scattered across the vast Altai area, are an exceptionally valuable source of information for archaeology. These precious archaeological resources, which sometimes have been preserved intact in the permafrost underground for over two millennia, are now under various threats, such as natural disasters, farmland expansion, touristic development, and most notably global warming. A detailed map or inventory of the mounds is essential but is still not available. In this study, we test the deep convolutional neural network (CNN) technique for automatic detection of stone mounds from high-resolution satellite images in four regions in the Altai Mountains. We propose three improvement techniques to increase the performance of off-the-shelf object detection methods that are originally proposed for daily-life objects. Our results demonstrate that it is feasible to apply CNN to detect stone mounds, and the detection results are good enough to capture their spatial distribution. CNN-based object detection can largely narrow down the search area for archaeologists in yet un-surveyed regions, and is therefore useful for preparing field survey campaigns and directing archaeological fieldwork. We also applied the method to an un-surveyed Altai Mountain area and successfully discovered stone mounds that are yet undocumented. Our method can potentially be applied to construct an inventory for all stone mounds present in the whole Altai Mountain region.
- Published
- 2021
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