Preliminary archeological site survey by UAV-borne lidar. A case study

Preliminary analysis of an archaeological site requires the acquisition of information by several diverse diagnostic techniques. Remote sensing plays an important role especially in spatially ex-tended and not easily accessible sites for the purposes of preventive and rescue archaeology, landscape archaeology, and intervention planning. In this paper, we present a case study of a de-tailed topographic survey based on a light detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensor carried by an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV; also known as drone). The high-resolution digital terrain model, obtained from the cloud of points automatically labeled as ground, was searched exhaustively by an expert operator looking for entrances to prehistoric hypogea. The study documents the useful-ness of such a technique to reveal anthropogenic structures hidden by vegetation and perform fast topographic documentation of the ground surface.