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Integrating Automated Annotation of Magnetic Prospection Data into GIS Workflows in Archaeology (demo paper)

Published: 22 December 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Archaeological excavations play a major role in gaining knowledge about prehistoric landscapes and ways of living. However, archaeological excavations are destructive acts and very resource intensive, so they cannot be performed in every area of interest. Therefore prospection methods have been developed, where feedbacks of e.g. lidar, radar or magnetic sensors are utilized to get an overview of the distribution, extent and complexity of underground structures in larger areas. After automated pre-processing of the sensor data arrays (and images) of these, grid data is provided as an input for exploration, analysis and annotation using geographic information system tools like QGIS. Annotating the images has been a fully manual task, performed by domain scientists. In this work we demonstrate a tool that supports domain scientists through automated annotation prediction. The implementation is integrated in the prevalent scientific workflow using available input and required output formats. The implementation is based on a pre-trained Rotated Retina Net. The manually annotated data of underground house remains from one of three archaeological sites is then used to pre-process and augment a feasible amount of training data for this specific task. One challenge was that global normalization of pixel values in the images did not yield useful results, because of modern infrastructure (such as utility pipes) distorting the magnetic feedback. A separated portion of the annotated data has been used for a quantitative evaluation of model performance. The system has also been applied to two additional, formerly unseen and non-annotated datasets where predicted annotations were found to be valuable for domain scientists. The system's output data can be used in GIS tools to edit annotations by experts, explore the sites, identify promising excavation sites and perform e.g. cluster analysis on house sizes and other features.

References

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Natalie Pickartz, Wolfgang Rabbel, Knut Rassmann, Robert Hofmann, René Ohlrau, Martin Thorwart, Dennis Wilken, Tina Wunderlich, Mykhailo Videiko, and Johannes Müller. 2022. Inverse Filtering of Magnetic Prospection Data---A Gateway to the Social Structure of Cucuteni-Tripolye Settlements? Remote Sensing 14, 3 (Jan 2022), 484.
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Knut Rassmann, René Ohlrau, Robert Hofmann, Carsten Mischka, Nataliia Burdo, Michail Yu. Videjko, and Johannes Müller. 2014. High precision Tripolye settlement plans, demographic estimations and settlement organization. Journal of Neolithic Archaeology (2014), 16 (2014).
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Apostolos Sarris (Ed.). 2015. Best practices of GeoInformatic technologies for the mapping of archaeolandscapes. Archaeopress Archaeology, Oxford, England.
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Chuanqi Tan, Fuchun Sun, Tao Kong, Wenchang Zhang, Chao Yang, and Chunfang Liu. 2018. A Survey on Deep Transfer Learning.
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  1. Integrating Automated Annotation of Magnetic Prospection Data into GIS Workflows in Archaeology (demo paper)

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          cover image ACM Conferences
          SIGSPATIAL '23: Proceedings of the 31st ACM International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems
          November 2023
          686 pages
          ISBN:9798400701689
          DOI:10.1145/3589132
          Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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          Published: 22 December 2023

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          Author Tags

          1. GIS
          2. grid data
          3. magnetic data
          4. magnetization
          5. annotation
          6. neural networks
          7. domain workflow

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