Fusion of geophysical images in the study of archaeological sites

Abstract

In the last few years, the idea of combining images, called image fusion, appeared and it has become a critical area of research and development. Image fusion can be defined as the process of combining images, taken from the same scene and create one single image containing all the essential information of the original images. A single sensor is not always sufficient. Different sensors, effective in different environmental conditions, provide different information of a scene. The underlying idea in this article is to combine geophysical images taken with different sensors, from the same location, aiming to improve the detectability of possible archaeological targets. Three different fusion approaches were used; fusion by calculating the average of the individual images, and through the use of wavelet and curvelet transforms. Furthermore, taking advantage of the curvelet domain we exploit possible prior angle information to enhance the angles where the remnants are expected. We applied the methods in seven different pairs of geophysical images taken from two different archaeological areas. In all cases the fused images produced significantly better results than each of the original geophysical images separately.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Alexandra Karamitrou: orcid.org/0000-0002-4142-1958

ORCID for Petros Bogiatzis: orcid.org/0000-0003-1902-7476

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