Characterizing Ancient Channel of the Yellow River From Spaceborne SAR: Case Study of Chinese Gaofen-3 Satellite

Abstract

The lower reaches of the ancient Yellow River (AYR) migrated very frequently, like a loong swinging its tail on the land of China. As the origin of Chinese civilization, AYR provided natural conditions for the people to thrive. However, the sediment carried by AYR still has a negative impact on local agricultural production. This letter, based on Gaofen-3, extracted scattering characteristics of archeological anomalies, detecting part of AYR during Song and Jin Dynasties, which was confirmed with field investigations. Then, an adaptive irregular convolution kernel U-Net (AICK-U-Net) was proposed to reconstruct the channel of AYR, based on the images obtained by the different polarization decomposition methods in October, and the precision and recall reached 96.21% and 94.45%, respectively. Finally, two decision-level methods were proposed to optimize the reconstruction results, improving the precision and recall to 96.39% and 97.36%, respectively. In summary, Spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR), with the application of polarization decomposition and neural network, provides new insights for detecting archeological anomalies and reconstructing archaeolandscapes.