Mapping Cultural Heritage in Coastal Areas with UAS: The Case Study of Lesvos Island

Apostolos Papakonstantinou,Michail Vaitis,Michail Chtenellis,Konstantinos Topouzelis,Vasilis Kopsachilis,Yannis Kourtzellis,Dimitris Kavroudakis

doi:10.3390/heritage2020089

Apostolos Papakonstantinou, Michail Vaitis + Show 5 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/heritage2020089

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Abstract

Dynamic processes in coastal zones and human activities in the coastal environment produce pressure on cultural heritage, especially in touristic places. Unmanned aerial systems (UAS) are used as an additional tool for monitoring cultural heritage sites in sensitive coastal areas. UASs provide low-cost accurate spatial data and high-resolution imagery products in various spatial and temporal scales. The use of UAS for mapping cultural heritage sites in the coastal zone is of increasing interest among scientists and archaeologists in terms of monitoring, documentation, mapping, and restoration. This study outlines the integration of UAS data acquisition and structure from motion (SfM) pipeline for the visualization of selected cultural heritage areas (ancient harbors) in the coastal zone. The UAS-SfM methodology produces very detailed orthophoto maps for mapping and detecting cultural heritage sites. Additionally, a metadata cataloging system has been developed in order to facilitate online searching operations for all products of the data acquisition, SfM pipeline, and cartographic processes. For this reason, a specific metadata profile was implemented, based on the European INSPIRE framework. As a result, datasets reusability and catalogs interoperability are promoted.

Highlights

Coastal cities that are built on the remains of ancient ones are facing a double challenge
The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-structure from motion (SfM) pipeline was performed for both study areas, Mytilene and Eresos ancient harbors, resulting in a sparse point cloud as a basis of the creation of the scene geometry represented as dense point cloud [44,51,52,53]
We have shown that the utilization of Unmanned aerial systems (UAS) for capturing rapidly, with agility and at low-cost aerial photographs of high resolution and accuracy, in conjunction with the SfM and MVS techniques, provide quality 2D visualizations of cultural heritage (CH) areas for archeologists and local authorities

Summary

Introduction

Coastal cities that are built on the remains of ancient ones are facing a double challenge. The ancient structures and building stock operate as tangible witnesses of the city’s historical development through centuries [1]. Given that the coastal zone of a city is subject to constant changes, the excavation works (usually in the framework of large-scale public work projects) reveal ancient structures designed to facilitate commercial maritime transport operations (harbors, quays and jetties) or defense structures (walls, onshore towers, coastal defense walls, etc.) [2,3,4]. The coastal zone accepts more pressure for economic exploitation. During the second half of the 20th century, in many coastal cities, additional public space was created with embankments, and port installations were covering the basins of the ancient harbors and changing the ancient coastline

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