CROSSED EXPERIMENTATIONS OF LOW-ALTITUDE SURVEYS FOR THE DETECTION OF BURIED STRUCTURES

Abstract. Drones are becoming essential in the field of heritage surveying, especially for large-scale archaeological site. The precision offered by the new survey tools (UAVs, sensors, processing software, etc.) should make it possible to obtain enough information to complete the plan of a site on an urban scale.

This paper shows the use of two types of sensors embedded simultaneously on a UAV with the aim of highlighting information that is often difficult to detect on the ground. By crossing RGB and thermal data, certain built-up limits seem to appear. Thanks to this new information, hypotheses of the urban structure are proposed. In other words, the aim is to bring out circulation hypotheses within a large complex archaeological site. Unlike the field of architectural survey where thermography is widely used, for example, to identify certain building pathologies, in archeology this technique does not seem to be part of the traditional survey pipeline and even less on large-scale sites. The possibility of using a third type of sensor is also sketched. The aerial-GPR would in fact make it possible to confirm the presence of a buried structure without having to go through systematic excavation and could provide a three-dimensional image of the ruins.