Methods

Methods

We have developed the following general method for the semi-automatic detection of circular archaeological objects:

  • Pre-process the remote sensing data to a form suitable for further processing
  • Convolve the image with templates of a range of sizes, corresponding to the range of expected sizes of the archaeological objects
  • Threshold the convolution result to find an initial (large) set of candidate detections.
  • (Optional) Remove detections outside masks.
  • Merge detections that are very close
  • Compute various measures of the deviation from an ideal model of the cultural heritage object
  • Remove detections that deviate too much from the ideal model
  • Compute a confidence level (1-6) for each detection
  • Visual inspection by archaeologist
  • If necessary: field inspection by archaeologist