Airborne laser scan reveals Arran's ancient sites | Hacker News Reader

Airborne laser scan reveals Arran's ancient sites

bbc.co.uk

108 pointsbauc27 comments

What is really interesting is that the main innovation is never mentioned in the BBC article. The academic they quote, Dave Cowley, is an author on "Using deep neural networks on airborne laser scanning data: Results from a case study of semi‐automatic mapping of archaeological topography on Arran, Scotland" from 11/2018 [0]. The "new 3D technology" that is becoming more "widely available" and allows for "rapid discovery" is not LIDAR (which is very old) but Deep Learning as applied to LIDAR. It's interesting b/c the BBC doesn't mention "Deep Learning" in the article. LIDAR is old enough that it was launched into space as early as 1971. Deep learning is most popular on images, but is becoming more popular recently on less structured data like the unordered collection of points in xD (x >= 3), so this is the new part.

(I will also say that in this case, the article makes images out of the LIDAR data and runs DL on that, but this is not mandatory. Checkout Pointet++ if interested. I just wanted to draw attention to the fact that the "cutting edge" part was not collecting data but analyzing it.)

[0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/arp.1731

p.s. I think the LIDAR data is here: https://remotesensingdata.gov.scot/collections , not on Canmore. It seems to be about a gigabyte total.

Thank you for this!

Do you happen to know if anyone out there is using DL techniques for identifying and most importantly for categorizing ancient pottery? I’m asking because until now most of that identifying and categorization has been of course made only “manually”, by archeologists themselves, with, imho, different levels of “success”. On top of genuine human errors (i.e. no-one can visually remember and compare all the pottery from a certain geographical region) there is also the added geo-political factor that must be taken into consideration, i.e. an archeologist from a specific country won’t categorize that easily a certain piece of pottery as belonging to a neighboring country/culture and thus a potential “enemy”. I’m thinking that further automatizing this process will get rid of human error.

Some kind of scale on those scan images would be helpful...

Or how it works at all. Is it like a shallow ground-penetrating radar? If not, how does it find these sites? The article left more questions than it gave answers.

It's just LiDAR.

They manipulate the data on a computer to explore the landscape (digitally removing tree canopies and things like that)

While you're technically correct, I think calling it "just" LiDAR is kind of underselling how amazing that technology really is!

It's LIDAR. It's main benefit for finding archaeology earthworks is that it is possible to remove the vegetation from the results. So anything obscured by trees becomes visible for example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidar#Airborne

MSM - even the BBC that are supposedly a bastion of good journalism - are generally terrible at covering science. My theory is that journalism now pays so poorly for most in the profession that all the decent graduates seek work elsewhere.

These LIDAR maps are really cool. There are some really interesting maps of the Amazon too:

https://www.businessinsider.nl/archaeologists-found-previous...

Yep, one interesting idea about these Amazon sites is that they add corroborating evidence to Francisco de Orellana (the first Spanish explorer to travel the length of the Amazon) that he claimed he had found huge cites with hundreds of thousands (maybe millions) of people living in the Amazon basin.

Presumably by the time later explorers came along 50 years later to verify his claims, the people had all been killed by European diseases like small pox and the jungle had claimed back the cities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_de_Orellana

TIL there's a place called the Firth of Clyde

And on the east coast we have the Firth of Forth

And of course up in the north, the Moray Firth :-)

I wonder if there's anything referred to as "Firth" in a non-Scotland place, perhaps up in Canada or in NZ?

update: yes (in England, Germany, NZ and Antarctica)! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firth#English_firths

And a bit further north there is the Pentland Firth which, of course, is nowhere near the Pentlands!

From wikipedia:

The name is presumed to be a corruption of the Old Norse "Petlandsfjörð",[1] meaning "the fjord of Pictland", and is completely unrelated to the Pentland Hills near Edinburgh.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentland_Firth

And for the ladies, there's Colin Firth.

downvotes?! no sense of humour.

That's a totally legit Firth, IMO

Yeah. That’s pure Dog-whistle politics.

Can anyone explain...?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics

By saying that they can scan buried ancient sites it resonates to the "enemy" that they can see everything it is trying to hide.

What, at a first glance, may sound like celebrating science is just warfare.

I know what the term "dog-whistle" means. The parent comment you responded to is "TIL there's a place called the Firth of Clyde", what is the dog whistle in that name?

Also Firth of Forth - home of the famous bridge that needs constant painting (or at least, did, until they developed a special paint).

Flying into Edinburgh on a clear day when circling over the Forth is spectacular.

Couldn't this "airborne laser scan" be used for spying?

Probably, just like any other technology.. what is your point?

Just about any sensor you can think of can be used for spying. Are the logistics of recovering camera film from spy satellites something you think about every time you use the digital camera in your smartphone though?

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