ArcheOS and UAVP for archaeological remote sensing

Hi all,

Finally I uploaded the presentation we did in the CAA Southampton 2012. Until our website is down (for maintenance), you can see it here. Inside you can find more details about the aerial archaeology project we mentioned in the post Xcopter drone and SfM techniques.

Here you can see the first slide, in the new Arc-Team theme I did playing with beamer, LaTeX :).

As you see the license is the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0), which we are planning to adopt soon also for ATOR to facilitate content sharing.

2016-03-31 Update

Thanks to self-archiving I can now add the bibliography related with this post:

 ResearchGate: Articl

Academia: Article

I hope it will be useful, even if no more up to date it can be a starting point to work in Aerial Archeology with Open Software and Hardware.

CAA 2012, Southampton

This year the Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology (CAA) conference will be hosted by the Archaeological Computing Research Group in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Southampton on 26-30 March 2012. Unfortunately we will have no time to stay the whole week in Southampton, but we will participate  to the session regarding "Novel Technologies For Supporting Archaeological Fieldwork" which will take place Wednesday, March 28. Our presentation ("Free and Open Source platform for remote sensing and 3D data acquisition") will focus on the combination of open source UAV (especially the UAVP drone) and ArcheOS. We will show as well some results about our last project of aerial archaeology in North Italy. 

I hope it will be an interesting experience (just to write some report about it). For more information about the congress, here is the official website: http://caaconference.org/.

Soon we will post the presentation, and some more details about our last research in UAV field.

2016-03-31 Update

Thanks to self-archiving I can now add the bibliography related with this post:

 ResearchGate: Article - Presentation

Academia: Article - Presentation

I hope it will be useful, even if no more up to date it can be a starting point to work in Aerial Archeology with Open Software and Hardware.

Gnewarchaeology, a successful workshop

Just a fast report from the workshop "Gnewarchaeology" in Ferrara (see the previous post): the meeting was a success, both for the quality of the presentations and for the discussion. It was a good chance to share ideas and remark the importance to use FLOSS in archaeological research. Soon we will upload our slides. In the meantime we want to thank the organizers (especially Domenico Giusti) for the great job they did.

3D PDF for archaeology

Today I am preparing the presentation for the meeting in Ferrara (see the previous post), so I did some experiments with 3D PDF. I think this kind of documentation has good potentialities in archaeology. To test them I took some old data (the 3D skull done with Sfm and IBM techniques), I build the surface in Meshlab and with the same software I saved an u3d file. Then, with the help of Kyle, I wrote a (very) simple 3d document. The result is the image below. As you can see, to visualize my 3d PDF I had to virtualize Windows inside my VritualBox and run Adobe Reader. Up to now I did not find a pdf reader for Linux which is able to visualize u3d, so if you know one, please let me know...

Anyway, if you want to visualize the result, you can download the file here.

Which GIS? gvSIG

To tell the truth, i don't use very often gvSIG. Anyway it is for sure one of the software which has evolved faster since its first inclusion in ArcheOS. Moreover the program is pretty similar to ESRI GIS, so it is perfect to help new users of FLOSS (people for whom a direct migration form ArcGIS to GRASS could be traumatic). An other important aspect is that gvSIG is maybe the GIS in ArcheOS which has the easiest (and most functional) tool to get direct layouts, so if you settle for basic maps (without to many complications) this is probably your software. In the image below you can see an example of layout model, done with an old version of gvSIG.

Metodo Aramus

In 2006 we joined the Aramus Excavations and Field School. That one was our first year in the project as a society. Our primary goal was to help in software migration from closed source softwares to FLOSS. The migration ended without problems, thanks to ArcheOS, but it caused some minor changes in the archaeological workflow. One of most important was the new methodology we had to develop in order to performe a fast photomapping technique of the excavation (at least as fast as the system they used before). We called this new methodology "metodo Aramus" and, untill now, we are still using it. The main reason is the quality we reached with the georeferenced photomosaics: compared with other traditional techniques, every single photo in the final image is equlized in brighteness and contrast. The result is a composite picture in which is more or less impossible to recognize the borders between the single photos.  

Comparison between traditional methodology and Metodo Aramus