UAS Imaging for Archaeological Survey and Documentation S. Esposito* a , P. Fallavollita a , M. G. Melis b , M. Balsi a , S. Jankowski c a Dept. of Information Engineering, Electronics, and Telecommunications (DIET), “La Sapienza” University, Rome, Italy; b Dept. of History, Human Sciences and Education, University of Sassari, Sassari, Italy; c Institute of Electronic Systems, Warsaw University of Technology, Warszawa, Poland. *salvatore.esposito@uniroma1.it ABSTRACT Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) are extensively used in diverse fields, wherever inexpensive and easy-to-deploy platforms are required for close-range remote sensing. Applications proposed in archaeology to date include ortho-photography and 3-D modeling. On the other hand, use of image processing and feature detection methods, well developed in other fields is hardly used. After reviewing technologies and methods for UAS-based surveying and surface modeling, we propose feature detection methods (e.g. line detection, texture segmentation) dedicated to extraction of structures in the images that are significant for archaeological survey, planning, and documentation and show results on selected case studies. Keywords: Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), ortho-photography, 3-D modeling, multi-rotors, K-means, directional filtering. 1. INTRODUCTION Since many years, aerial ortho-photos have been widely used for large or small scale survey, documentation and report. For archaeological survey oriented to preventive archaeology, cultural heritage planning and preservation, resolution of remote sensing or satellite images is often insufficient with respect to needs, so that shorter range data acquisition is necessary. Close-range imaging is very useful for survey analysis but still an expensive tool, normally requiring aerial operations with manned planes or helicopters. Due to such very high costs, researchers are obliged to decrease time and size of this kind of surveys, and several restrictions make its use prohibitive for every day survey documentation. On a small scale, in archaeological excavation the traditional manual documentation, a time-consuming process based on drawing with ink pen on gridded sheets, is often integrated by ortho-images, obtained by cameras mounted on the top of telescopic poles. Certainly this procedure means a good improvement respect to the manual documentation providing faster operations and more precise results. However, in this kind of simple setup it is not possible to take images higher than a few meters, and mosaic software is needed to produce the whole area coverage and reduce distortions . We demonstrate that, only relying on small UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles), able to flight in an easy and safe autopilot mode, it’s possible to obtain estimable results in terms of costs, quality and easiness. In particular, this is true for photogrammetry procedures that provide image-based modeling, for accurate measurement and 3D. It provides the most cost-effective and affordable way to do accurate aerial 3D scanning, measurement and surveying. Moreover, relying on these preliminary remarks, our multidisciplinary research team has been tuning and conducting feasibility tests for innovative data exploitation that has been also developed, permitting to easily and automatically extract features and contours relying on machine learning algorithms. We’ll demonstrate that this simple process chain, permits full and semi-automatic archaeological survey documentation. Photonics Applications in Astronomy, Communications, Industry, and High-Energy Physics Experiments 2013, edited by Ryszard S. Romaniuk, Proc. of SPIE Vol. 8903, 89030K © 2013 SPIE · CCC code: 0277-786X/13/$18 · doi: 10.1117/12.2035318 Proc. of SPIE Vol. 8903 89030K-1 Downloaded From: http://proceedings.spiedigitallibrary.org/ on 10/29/2013 Terms of Use: http://spiedl.org/terms