id
	16596
Url
	https://chloe.cnr.it/s/BiDiAr/item/16596
Resource template
	Academic Article
Resource class
	bibo:AcademicArticle
Title
	Automated Extraction of the Archaeological Tops of Qanat Shafts from VHR Imagery in Google Earth
Creator
	Luo, Lei
	Wang, Xinyuan
	Guo, Huadong
	Liu, Chuansheng
	Liu, Jie
	Li, Li
	Du, Xiaocui
	Qian, Guoquan
Date
	2014
Language
	eng
Rights
	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Abstract
	Qanats in northern Xinjiang of China provide valuable information for agriculturists and anthropologists who seek fundamental understanding of the distribution of qanat water supply systems with regard to water resource utilization, the development of oasis agriculture, and eventually climate change. Only the tops of qanat shafts (TQSs), indicating the course of the qanats, can be observed from space, and their circular archaeological traces can also be seen in very high resolution imagery in Google Earth. The small size of the TQSs, vast search regions, and degraded features make manually extracting them from remote sensing images difficult and costly. This paper proposes an automated TQS extraction method that adopts mathematical morphological processing methods before an edge detecting module is used in the circular Hough transform approach. The accuracy assessment criteria for the proposed method include: (i) extraction percentage (E) = 95.9%, branch factor (B) = 0 and quality percentage (Q) = 95.9% in Site 1; and (ii) extraction percentage (E) = 83.4%, branch factor (B) = 0.058 and quality percentage (Q) = 79.5% in Site 2. Compared with the standard circular Hough transform, the quality percentages (Q) of our proposed method were improved to 95.9% and 79.5% from 86.3% and 65.8% in test sites 1 and 2, respectively. The results demonstrate that wide-area discovery and mapping can be performed much more effectively based on our proposed method.
Is Part Of
	Remote Sensing
Doi
	https://doi.org/10.3390/rs61211956
Issn
	2072-4292
Issue
	12
Pages
	11956-11976
Uri
	https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/6/12/11956
Volume
	6
Homepage
	https://www.zotero.org/groups/5293298/bidiar/items/U355TIHDitem-list

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