The Project
The objective of this study is to perform a non-destructive archaeological search for the tomb of Genghis Khan utilizing modern digital tools from a variety of disciplines, including digital imagery, computer vision, non-destructive surveying, and on-site digital archaeology. The study is comprised of three individual phases. The initial phase of the project consists of two primary objectives: (a) the continuation of a historical expedition of the information surrounding Genghis Khan’s life and the events which took place in the summer of 1227, and (b) the development of local collaborations and government/media support.
The second phase is focused on the collection and analysis of large arrays of aerial and satellite digital imagery taken of the identified areas of interest. These include regions of the Ordos desert in Inner Mongolia and the Khan Khenti region of Northeastern Mongolia. Object recognition technology developed in the Computer Vision Laboratory at UCSD will be implemented to identify and archive anomalies in the sprawling uninhabited landscape.
The final phase of the search is composed of the systematic non-destructive surveying and mapping of the anomalies. Electromagnetic induction (EMI), magnetometry, and ground penetrating radar (GPR) are the geophysical tools which will be applied. Leveraging state of the art super-resolution techniques designed to assemble high resolution, high quality digital images from multiple lower resolution images we hope to contribute to the advancement of these tools.
