Home > Streamlined Archaeo-Geophysical Data Processing and Integration for DoD Field Use > Technical Description > Technical Objectives
Technical Objectives | Data Processing Details | Processing Steps
The scientific objectives of the project are to increase the effectiveness, reliability, reproducibility and performance of the analytical processes that are needed to convert the multiple instrument sensor data to effective cultural resources management information. Combining the data processing and integration innovations developed during the the Department of Defense Strategic Environmental Research and Development (SERDP) project CS-1263 New Approaches to the Use and Integration of Multi-Sensor Remote Sensing for Historic Resource Identification and Evaluation into a single, easily learned software package will make this technology transfer possible. A second objective is to expand access to these innovative methods to a wide community of practitioners, increasing their use and, thereby, reducing the time and cost of the scientific studies necessary to meet the previously mentioned regulatory requirements. The effort has as its third major objective the practical demonstration of the value and productiveness of this approach to regulatory reviewing officials responsible for assessing the DoD’s compliance with 36CFR800 and other federal laws and regulations. A clear and effective demonstration of the methods to the state, national and tribal historic preservation regulatory elements (e.g. SHPOs, ACHP, and THPOs and tribal historic preservation liaisons) will be critical to the acceptance of these methods so that their use by installations and others is an acceptable, even desirable, approach from the perspective of these important oversight groups.
This new strategy will meet all of the multi-instrument data processing, integration and data fusion requirements, making multi-instrument state-of-the-science remote sensing evaluations of archaeological sites far more accessible to DoD users. CS1263 has demonstrated that data from a suite of sensors (e.g., ground-penetrating radar, magnetometry, electrical resistance, induced electrical conductivity, magnetic susceptibility, multispectral scanning, panchromatic photography, and thermography), when properly preprocessed and fused, yield dramatically improved results which are of considerable management value. In particular, use of these methods enhance the reliability and reduce the invasiveness of investigations needed to evaluate the NRHP eligibility status of archaeological sites. A minimally invasive option for NRHP evaluation is particularly important at sites that are likely to contain Native American burials. In settings when avoidance is not possible due to project requirements, these methods provide the basis for an approach to site mitigation (i.e., large-scale data recovery, analysis, and reporting to offset the loss of scientifically and culturally important resources) that involves less excavation and long-term curation of artifacts, thereby substantially reducing project costs. Without effective integrated preprocessing and fusion, however, these benefits are lost or dramatically reduced. This demonstration project will provide for a full range of data processing and fusion options for the expert user as well as “wizards” designed to guide less experienced practitioners through the processing steps. Substantial benefit will be realized in streamlining ground penetrating radar (GPR) processing, which provided some of the most spectacular results in the SERDP research, but which was found to be the most labor intensive method. Significant cost savings will also be realized for the processing, integration and fusion of data collected using all other sensors. The product will maintain all data in a single software environment while preserving spectral resolutions and recording processing steps for metadata documentation (the current ad-hoc approach inherently entails the loss of spectral resolution and inhibits the ability to keep track of each transformation as data are moved from one software environment to the next for manipulation).
