
Airborne laser scan reveals Arran's ancient sites - bauc
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-49989351
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debbiedowner
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](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/arp.1731)

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

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Darkphibre
Thank you for this!

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

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degenerate
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.

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kjaftaedi
It's just LiDAR.

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

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

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

[https://www.businessinsider.nl/archaeologists-found-
previous...](https://www.businessinsider.nl/archaeologists-found-previously-
undiscovered-settlements-in-the-amazon-2018-3)

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EvilGrin
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_de_Orellana)

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joemaller1
TIL there's a place called the Firth of Clyde

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hrnnnnnn
And on the east coast we have the Firth of Forth

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smcl
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firth#English_firths)

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

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growlist
And for the ladies, there's Colin Firth.

downvotes?! no sense of humour.

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smcl
That's a totally legit Firth, IMO

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

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catalogia
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?

