Archaeological Prospection and Site Monitoring with Medium to Very High Resolution SAR Imagery: Case Studies in Rome (Italy)

Remote sensing has increasingly supported archaeological and cultural heritage applications over the past century, and satellite Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) has played a key role in advancing this application field. In this paper, two case studies from the wider Province of Rome (Italy) are exploited to investigate SAR imaging capabilities for archaeological prospection and heritage site protection. Medium to very high spatial resolution SAR data acquired by RADARSAT-2, Sentinel-1, ALOS-1 and COSMO-SkyMed are used to trial the detection of crop marks at (semi-)buried and sub-surface archaeological features in Ostia-Portus. Big data stacks of Sentinel-1 imagery are processed with the parallelized Small BAseline Subset (SBAS) Interferometric SAR (InSAR) method to monitor the stability of cultural heritage assets within the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Rome.