(2022) Lasers reveal ancient pyramids and canals hidden in the Amazon | …basically a nice little primer on LIDAR and its use in archaeology, pretty pictures

The laser pulse repetition rate was 200?kHz. Flight altitude was 200 m above ground level, airspeed was 45?knots. Missions were flown in 200-m parallel strips, with 50% overlap. Data post-processing was done by M.S. (ArcTron) using the RIEGL software RiAnalyze. He successfully overcame fundamental problems in the raw data resulting from a time offset of 18?s between raw laser data and trajectory and unusual height differences between point clouds of adjacent tracks. Through mutual manual and partially automated/iterative corrections, at least visually plausible results were achieved after many attempts. The remaining differences of up to 50?cm had to be accepted. Despite these errors, accuracy in the visualization of the archaeological structures is good. Raw point cloud densities varied between 13?million and 20?million points per km2, but generally the density was about 18?million points per km2. The filtering was done automatically taking into account, from the outset, only the last pulses and points with only one reflection. 

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04780-4

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *