Norsk Regnesentral

Main activities

Detection of burial mounds in agricultural land

The project has acquired several very high resolution satellite images of agricultural land, mainly in Vestfold. Archaeologists have identified many circular patterns in the images. These patterns are believed to be the remains of burial mounds. The mound itself has been destroyed, but the circular ash-filled ditch often remains under the tilled layer. The ash-filled ditch will create different soil moisture and growing conditions for cereals, resulting in circular soil marks before the growing season starts, and crop marks at the end of the growing season, just before harvesting. The soil marks and crop marks are not guarenteed to manifest themselves every year, and they are visible only for a limited time.


Four circular crop marks clearly visible in a Quickbird image of Lågendalen, Vestfold County, acquired on 27 April 2005.

The automatic detection method consists of the following steps:

  • local contrast enhancement;
  • template matching;
  • feature extraction;
  • decision-tree-based classification.

The method is optimized to work on the 0.6 m resolution panchromatic band of Quickbird images.

We also plan to develop a similar method for aerial photography of 0.1-0.5 m resolution.

Detection of tar pits and burial mounds in forested land

The project will get access to airborne lidar data of forest areas containing tar pits and burial mounds. We plan to develop automatic detection methods for these.

Development of graphical user interface

For archaeologists to be able to use the detection algorithms, we have developed a graphical user interface, from which the archaeologist may start the automatic detection procedure and validate the result. The validated result can be imported to a GIS software for further analysis.

For more information contact: Øivind Due Trier

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