Japanese media: AI efficiently analyzes Nazca geoglyphs

Reference News Network reported on June 10According to Japan's "Yomiuri Shimbun" website reported on June 4, a research team composed of Yamagata University and others announced that it will analyze aerial photography with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) Photo, four Nazca geoglyphs discovered. The Nazca Paintings are a World Heritage Site located in Peru, a South American country. When it comes to finding new Nazca paintings, artificial intelligence can be used faster than the naked eye alone. "The amount of work that used to take 20 years to complete now only takes one year." Geoglyph research, which still has many mysteries to be solved, is expected to be further accelerated.

The previous approach was for researchers to select geoglyph candidates from aerial photos with the naked eye, and then conduct field surveys to make specific assessments. The geoglyphs are scattered about 20 kilometers from east to west and about 15 kilometers from south to south of the Nazca Mesa, with lengths ranging from a few meters to hundreds of meters. It takes a long time to review aerial photos one by one with the naked eye.

In 2018, Yamagata University's Nazca Research Institute and International Business Machines Japan conducted an empirical experiment using artificial intelligence to find geoglyphs. Through deep learning technology, AI can use large amounts of data to master land characteristics, thereby improving the efficiency of discovering new land characteristics.

Researchers found that the ground paintings contain many shapes, such as unique patterns such as characters, animals and geometric figures, and it was difficult for them to determine the common characteristics between them. We only have 21 available geological data, which is far from enough to apply to the thousands or even tens of thousands of data required in deep learning.

The solution adopted by the research team is not to let AI read a painting as a whole, but to subdivide it into various parts such as "head" and "feet", allowing AI to learn a total of 307 pieces of data. If a painting contains the previously mentioned elements, researchers can use artificial intelligence to spot them.

Using AI to read aerial photos of the Nazca Mesa, it only occupies about 10% of the surface area, but it can quickly prompt multiple geoglyph candidates, which is 21 times faster than searching with the naked eye. Papers summarizing the research results have been published in international academic journals related to archeology.

Through field surveys, four types of geoglyphs were identified, namely "Man" (about 5 meters), "Feet" (78 meters), "Fish" (about 19 meters) and "Bird" (about 17 meters). . Among the 143 newly discovered geoglyphs announced in 2019, portrait geoglyphs were included, while the other three types of geoglyphs were among the 168 geoglyphs announced last year.

The research team plans to advance investigations throughout the Nazca Mesa in the future. In recent years, there has been an increase in attention to the issue of geoglyphs being damaged due to urban expansion and other factors. AI quickly discovers unknown geoglyphs and helps protect the Nazca geoglyphs.

Archeology professor Masato Sakai said that he is full of expectations to discover more original murals through full use of artificial intelligence technology. This will help clarify the purpose of ancient people's geoglyphs. ”

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