Preprint Article Version 1 Preserved in Portico This version is not peer-reviewed

Auto-Extraction of Linear Archaeological Traces of Tuntian Irrigation Canals in Miran Site (China) from Gaofen-1 Satellite Imagery

Lei Luo
ORCID logo ,
Xinyuan Wang
* ,
Rosa Lasaponara
,
Bo Xiang
,
Jing Zhen
,
Lanwei Zhu
,
Ruixia Yang
,
Decheng Liu
,
Chuansheng Liu
Version 1 : Received: 3 April 2018 / Approved: 4 April 2018 / Online: 4 April 2018 (11:56:47 CEST)

A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.

Luo, L.; Wang, X.; Lasaponara, R.; Xiang, B.; Zhen, J.; Zhu, L.; Yang, R.; Liu, D.; Liu, C. Auto-Extraction of Linear Archaeological Traces of Tuntian Irrigation Canals in Miran Site (China) from Gaofen-1 Satellite Imagery. Remote Sens. 2018, 10, 718. Luo, L.; Wang, X.; Lasaponara, R.; Xiang, B.; Zhen, J.; Zhu, L.; Yang, R.; Liu, D.; Liu, C. Auto-Extraction of Linear Archaeological Traces of Tuntian Irrigation Canals in Miran Site (China) from Gaofen-1 Satellite Imagery. Remote Sens. 2018, 10, 718.

Abstract

This paper describes the use of the Chinese Gaofen-1 (GF-1) satellite imagery to automatically extract tertiary Linear Archaeological Traces of Tuntian Irrigation Canals (LATTICs) located in the Miran site. The site is adjacent to the ancient Loulan Kingdom at the eastern margin of the Taklimakan Desert in western China. GF-1 data was processed following atmospheric and geometric correction, and spectral analyses were carried out for multispectral data. The low values produced by SSI indicate that it is difficult to distinguish buried tertiary LATTICs from similar backgrounds using spectral signatures. Thus, based on the textual characteristics of high-resolutionGF-1 panchromatic data, this paper proposes an automatic approach that combines joint morphological bottom and hat transformation with a Canny edge operator. The operator was improved by adding stages of geometric filtering and gradient vector direction analysis. Finally, the detected edges of tertiary LATTICs were extracted using the GIS-based draw tool and converted into shapefiles for archaeological mapping within a GIS environment. The proposed automatic approach was verified with an average accuracy of 95.76% for 754 tertiary LATTICs in the entire Miran site and compared with previous manual interpretation results. The results indicate that GF-1 VHR PAN imagery can successfully uncover the ancient tuntian agricultural landscape. Moreover, the proposed method can be generalized and applied to extract linear archaeological traces such as soil and crop marks in other geographic locations.

Keywords

auto-extraction; remote sensing archaeology; tuntian; LATTICs; GF-1; Silk Road; Miran

Subject

Arts and Humanities, Archaeology

Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Download PDF

Comments (0)

We encourage comments and feedback from a broad range of readers. See criteria for comments and our Diversity statement.

Leave a public comment
Send a private comment to the author(s)
* All users must log in before leaving a comment
Views 0
Downloads 0
Comments 0
Metrics 0
Get PDF Cite Share 0
Bookmark BibSonomy Mendeley Reddit Delicious
×
Alerts
Notify me about updates to this article or when a peer-reviewed version is published.
We use cookies on our website to ensure you get the best experience.
Read more about our cookies here.