Prisma Hyperspectral Image Enhancement for Revealing Cultural Heritage Sites from Earth Observation (PERSEO)

Sub-surface or hidden Cultural Heritage (CH) sites can be discovered through Earth Observation (EO) data from a variety of sensors (e.g., hyperspectral, multispectral, radar) by identifying and analysing anomalies or traces on bare soils, crops or vegetation that could be connected to the presence of archaeological deposits under them. Buried heritage contexts in fact can limit the growth and development of vegetation or determine a change in the color and/or humidity level of bare soils above them, leading to an alteration of their spectral characteristics that can be identified through EO spectral images.

The main goal of PERSEO (PRISMA Hyperspectral Image Enhancement for Revealing Cultural Heritage Sites from Earth Observation) project is to ascertain the suitability of PRISMA hyperspectral data for applications in CH domain, namely in the identification of yet unknown buried ancient and historical heritage sites, monuments, settlements and landscape infrastructures. To achieve this goal, the project will i) develop novel (and improve existing) super-resolution techniques tailored to hyperspectral PRISMA data to increase their spatial resolution; ii) design an unsupervised deep learning architecture for anomaly detection to automatically identify sub-surface CH sites using unlabelled hyperspectral data; iii) implement a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) software library to carry out the detection task.

Project funding: Italian Space Agency (ASI)