AI in nature is always interesting, but nature AI as applied to archaeology is even more so. Research led by Yamagata University aimed to identify new Nasca lines — the enormous “geoglyphs” in Peru. You might think that, being visible from orbit, they’d be pretty obvious — but erosion and tree cover from the millennia since these mysterious formations were created mean there are an unknown number hiding just out of sight. After being trained on aerial imagery of known and obscured geoglyphs, a deep learning model was set free on other views, and amazingly it detected at least four new ones, as you can see below [ed, above]. Pretty exciting! via: (TC)
[ed. See also (original paper): Accelerating the discovery of new Nasca geoglyphs using deep learning (ScienceDirect).]
