from Hacker News

Show HN: High-resolution surface analysis with Lidar data

by folli on 5/21/25, 8:40 PM with 10 comments

• by schobi on 5/24/25, 9:12 AM

  Thanks for sharing!

  The description confused me, as it describes the use of a real Lidar measurements to detect "change" in the terrain. But certainly, it can't be a temporal change before and after... to detect medieval settings in the data. Is the area still changing differentlybetween scans over multi year's? I don't think so.

  I think this is visualization code highlighting natural VS. human train structures, at known locations of old settlements? Showing different approaches on how to visualize the man-made heights in the terrain.

  But still, I'm lost how this could help finding new ones..

• by lyu07282 on 5/24/25, 1:26 PM

  > LiDAR has some interesting use cases in archaeology (Caspari, 2023), particularly for uncovering man-made structures that are hidden beneath vegetation or subtle terrain changes. It allows archaeologists to identify features such as ancient roads, walls, building foundations, and agricultural terraces that may be invisible to the naked eye or conventional aerial photography.

  Wasn't this also how the cities in the Amazon were discovered as well? These maps are fascinating. I can see ancient structures everywhere! Then again I'm not a trained archeologist.

• by weinzierl on 5/24/25, 10:29 AM

  "Buildings and vegetation are removed, revealing the underlying topography."

  I understand how vegetation could be removed, but buildings? How is that accomplished?