Technique for Manipulating Satellite Photos Now Reveals Ancient Images (2025)

My public high school was a "Geography / GIS magnet school" because some unnamed retired geography teacher donated a very large sum to make it happen. I was an underachieving student with no ambitions to go anywhere, doing just enough to pass. The geography program teacher pulled me aside and encouraged me to sign up for Grade 10 GIS the next year. It became my first academic passion and my entire life pivoted.

I studied GIS/remote sensing every year. I participated in Skills Canada a few times, eventually going the full distance by winning gold at the regional and provincial levels. I was accepted to University for GIS/Remote Sensing. I earned a BES, defended a thesis, earned an MSc, won a national award for GIS, and got into remote sensing + robotics as a career, which I'm still doing ~15 years later.

I don't think I have the words to really describe just how thankful I am for everything teachers and professors did along the way to support and encourage people like me.

At 12 years old, they get an Arduino and start programming in C. Then over the years they do all kinds of interesting things with it: build a car with controlled acceleration, build a tiny house with all kinds of sensors and controllers, monitor algae breeding.

When my son was 16, they brewed their own beer (Hey, it's Belgium and they can legally drink at 16 :D)

Now in the final year, they can propose their own projects. I heard previous years did things like create their own windmill and analyse the efficiency, electric generators in rain drainpipe, etc.

I got this as a result https://i.imgur.com/RsXx3y2.jpeg and it certainly doesn't preserve the color of the rest of the image (there are probably more algorithmic steps needed for that) but it does seem to make highlight the same faint patterns much more clearly.

The center point controls the gamma correction, so you can map a biased distribution (mostly bright or dark for example) to be more evenly distributed.

That was the purpose of that step - move the midpoint slider to about where the peak in the histogram is, to get an evenly distributed range.

The low/high slider can be moved towards that to increase the contrast.

"Contrast" here will only apply to the A/B channels, which is the color information, so it's increasing the color contrast and unbiasing it, while keeping the luminance information.

Photoshop also can do the same transform, and interactively in the LAB colorspace (no need to combine/uncombine the channels first).

Life is short, assuming it is fully non-destructive and leave-no-trace, just do it until someone gets in your way.

It seems quite strange that they could be that prolific while requiring that much manual labor to construct yet there's no written reference to any of them.

It actually doesn't improve the readability of the letters carved in stone nor does it show any hidden details on the surroundings (at least in my very small amount of pictures). But that's not unexpected as they readability depends on the angle of light and shadow.

I have to look into my archives.. maybe there are some wall paintings on which this kind of algorithms excels.

Surprisingly it's working very good in finding living plants and separating it from hay.