1. Discernibility of Burial Mounds in High-Resolution X-Band SAR Images for Archaeological Prospections in the Altai Mountains.
- Author
-
Balz, Timo, Mingsheng Liao, Caspari, Gino, and Bihong Fu
- Subjects
- *
MOUNDS (Archaeology) , *HIGH resolution imaging , *LANDSCAPE archaeology , *SYNTHETIC aperture radar - Abstract
The Altai Mountains are a heritage-rich archaeological landscape with monuments in almost every valley. Modern nation state borders dissect the region and limit archaeological landscape analysis to intra-national areas of interest. Remote sensing can help to overcome these limitations. Due to its high precision, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data can be a very useful tool for supporting archaeological prospections, but compared to optical imagery, the detectability of sites of archaeological interest is limited. We analyzed the limitations of SAR using TerraSAR-X images in different modes. Based on ground truth, the discernibility of burial mounds was analyzed in different SAR acquisition modes. We show that very-high-resolution TerraSAR-X staring spotlight images are very well suited for the task, with >75% of the larger mounds being discernible, while in images with a lower spatial resolution only a few large sites can be detected, at rates below 50%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2016
- Full Text
- View/download PDF