VEiL and the Automation agenda at CAA2017

On March 15th, MC Fellow Arianna Traviglia has co-chair the session Automation is here to stay! The hitch-hiker’s guide to automated object detection and image processing in remote sensing during  the CAA2017 Atlanta Conference Digital archaeologies, material worlds (past and present) held in Atlanta (GA, USA) from 14 to 16 March 2017 togeher with Dr Dave Cowley of Historic Environment Scotland. Building on the 2016 CAA session in Oslo on Computer vision for automated object identification, this session aimed to develop further the automation agenda for remote sensing image processing. The willingness to engage with such approaches, often through applying techniques borrowed from other disciplines (such as medical imaging, face recognition, surveillance and security, social media) and the increasing power of computer vision techniques and machine learning approaches was made clear by the papers presented during the session that illustrated convincing applications that overcome the  earlier limitations of spectral and object-based methods and enable the recognition of landscape patterns/objects produced by the near-unlimited assortment of forms, dimensions and spectral properties that mark soil-concealed anthropogenic remains.
The session offered a forum for practitioners of these new techniques, welcomed presentations on theory, experiences, and projects related to the theme of automatic object identification in archaeological remote sensing. Prospects and opportunities of the discipline were highlighted during the long discussion panel that follewd the presentation session, and challenges ahead discussed, bringing together archaeologists and experts from other disciplines presenting methods that can be applied to the archaeological domain.