Automatic detection of potential buried archaeological sites in Saruq Al-Hadid, United Arab Emirates

Marwa Chendeb El Rai; Mina Al-Saad; Nour Aburaed; Saeed Al Mansoori; Hussain Al-Ahmad; Stephen Marshall

doi:10.1117/12.2573985

20 September 2020 Automatic detection of potential buried archaeological sites in Saruq Al-Hadid, United Arab Emirates

Marwa Chendeb El Rai, Mina Al-Saad, Nour Aburaed, Saeed Al Mansoori, Hussain Al-Ahmad, Stephen Marshall

Proceedings Volume 11535, Remote Sensing Technologies and Applications in Urban Environments V; 115350G (2020) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2573985
Event: SPIE Remote Sensing, 2020, Online Only

Abstract

The use of remote sensing in archaeological research allows the prospection of sub-surfaces in arid regions non- intrusively before the on-site investigation and excavation. While the actual detection method of expected buried archaeological structures is based on visual interpretation, this work provides a supporting archaeological guidance using remote sensing. The aim is to detect potential archaeological remains underneath the sand. This paper focuses on Saruq Al-Hadid surroundings, which is an archaeologist site discovered in 2002, located about 50 km south-east of Dubai, as archaeologists believe that other archaeological sites are potentially buried in the surroundings. The input data is derived from a combination of wavelength L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (ALOS PALSAR), which is able to penetrate the sand, and multispectral optical images (Landsat 7). This paper develops a new strategy to help in the detection of suspected buried structures. The data fusion of surface roughness and spectral indices enables tackling the well-known limitation of SAR images and offers a set of pixels having an archaeological signature different from the manmade structures. The potential buried sites are then classified by performing a pixel-level unsupervised classification algorithm such as K-means cluster analysis. To test the performance of the proposed method, the results are compared with those obtained by visual interpretation.

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Citation Download Citation

Marwa Chendeb El Rai, Mina Al-Saad, Nour Aburaed, Saeed Al Mansoori, Hussain Al-Ahmad, and Stephen Marshall "Automatic detection of potential buried archaeological sites in Saruq Al-Hadid, United Arab Emirates", Proc. SPIE 11535, Remote Sensing Technologies and Applications in Urban Environments V, 115350G (20 September 2020); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2573985

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