A Mound or Not a Mound? How Rasters and Point Clouds Can Help with False Positive Identification

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This poster will discuss the benefits of using different combinations of rasters for large scale survey and the functional usage of viewing problematic mounds in the point cloud to weed away the false positives. Maya sites around Mesoamerica have and will be scanned with LiDAR. Since the turn of the century, technology has improved and now the data collected is higher resolution but also more sensitive to smaller height changes. As a result, it has become both easier and harder to identify Maya mounds. Smaller mounds are more likely to be identifiable in the data, but extra features that look like mounds (false positives) will also be found which only ground truthing can weed out. Many interpretations of LiDAR have focused on various combinations of images and visualizations (raster images). On their own, these are limiting for verifying problematic mounds because they are dependent on the ground classification (input by the researcher/software). Instead, viewing the equivalent raw data, as the point cloud, rather than a generalized surface, provides greater clarity to check and differentiate between potential mounds and false positives, because there is less generalization.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40363.0