Advancement in Automatic Monitoring and Detection of Archaeological Sites using a Hybrid Process of Remote Sensing, GIS Techniques and a Shape Detection Algorithm

The method developed in the frame of the project HORUS (Heritage Observation and Retrieval Under Sand funded by European Space Agency) for the automatic monitoring and identification of lost or undiscovered archaeological sites in Egypt has been improved and applied to the new available high resolution radar images by Cosmo Sky-Med satellites. The use of active high resolution active sensors enables continue monitoring of the target area with all whether condition (day, night with any cloudy coverage) and Cosmo Sky-Med satellites are mainly devoted to observe the “Mediterranean area (“Med in fact is for “Mediterranean”) where is the highest density of the Archaeological sites in the world. The method uses shape detection techniques on satellite imagery superposed in a GIS environment. For an area of interest, the EO data available from various satellites is pre-processed and from historical plans a shape file of the archaeological structure of interest is produced. A shape detection algorithm employing a shape matched operator is applied to the EO image to produce a detection image identifying the most probable location of the archaeological structure of interest. The shape-matched operator employed is the derivative of double exponential (DODE) operator. The final product is a GIS data set assembled as a list of required features and layers, all converted and processed in the same Geographical Reference System. The article shows the most recent advancement using the operator applied to high resolution X-band SAR images by Cosmo Sky-Med.