Using RPAS for the detection of archaeological objects using multispectral and thermal imaging

Abstract

A locality that we studied was an archaeological site located near the village of Ctiněves, in the district of Litoměřice in the Czech Republic. The archaeological site is a polycultural site. It is very significant and plays an important role in the Czech archaeology. During our research, we found that cropmarks that were visible in 2016s were not visible in 2017 at all. This has brought us to study climate conditions and their influence on cropmarks. We studied nine other archaeological sites in the neighborhood of our site. During this research, we were looking for cropmarks and what kind of crop was planted there. We were searching for a correlation between climate conditions and cropmark visibility in this part of the study. Our second part of the study focused on the crop used at the site and whether there was an influence on the cropmarks. We tested grain, corn and rapeseed oil. Grain had the best results for cropmark visibility in our case. Rapeseed oil results suggested that cropmarks are significantly reduced. Our last area of interest dealt with using a thermal imager for archaeological features detection on the site without crops. We made several flights with the thermal imager, some of them before sunrise and some after sunrise. Our results showed several types of features on a football pitch, which is located on part of the archaeological site.

Mapping Heterogeneous Buried Archaeological Features Using Multisensor Data from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

“…The use of remote sensing to survey and research archaeological sites is well established in the literature [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8], and although conventional aerial photography and LiDAR are commonplace the use of multisensor data acquisition is less well represented. In this study the authors have selected two separate archaeological sites which differ considerably in character, period, and physical aspect and which both have known multiperiod features.…”

Virtual Museums – The Future of Historical Monuments Documentation and Visualization

“…DRM can be made after filtering or editing DSM (a typical real relief is without vegetation, constructions, buildings and cars, for example). Our department uses all the methods for getting DRM or DSM (Sedina, 2018). Laser scanning or terrestrial photogrammetry can be used for small objects or areas, while for large areas winged drones like eBee (area up to square kilometres) or multicopters like DJI Phantom 4 or Mavic (hectares) are used.…”

Combined Precise Documentation and Virtual Reconstruction of Prophet Nahum Shrine in Alqosh, Iraq

“…In addition to this, approximately 2000 pictures were taken with the photogrammerical IBMR method by the Canon Mark 5D calibrated camera. Finally, the aerial photogrammetry method was used for the processing of aerial photos (Matouskova, 2016b) (Sedina, 2018b) (Faltynova, 2016) , with about 100 aerial pictures taken by RPAS (Remotely Piloted Aircraft System) DJI Phantom 4 for the creation of an ortophoto of the nearest neighbourhood of the shrine ( fig.1-2, fig.6). The laser scanner data was registered to the detail model that contains about 100 million points.…”