Extraction of Linear Features using Synthetic Aperture Radar

A very promising addition to the research armoury of archaeology is the use of airborne and spaceborne synthetic aperture radar. By exploiting the capacity of centimetre wavelengths to penetrate vegetation cover, a series of roads and irrigation channels hidden beneath the rainforests of Cambodia have been partially revealed. This paper applies and develops a segmented application of the Radon transformation, to isolate and correlate these linear features, and by doing so gives a reasonable to good approximation of the extent of infrastructure in Angkor; the former capital of the Khmer Empire.