Identifying qanats and their impact on the formation of Zuzan city using convolutional neural networks

Articles in Press

Authors

Department of Archeology of Mazandaran University, Babolsar

10.22084/nb.2025.29061.2663

Abstract

Water resource management in arid and semi-arid regions has been a major human goal for the formation and preservation of urban and rural communities. Qanats (underground water channels) in these regions are one of the systems for supplying and distributing water. This underground system is only identifiable on the ground surface and in aerial and satellite images by the shaft, a circular depression that indicates the course of the qanat. To save time, automated methods can be used to identify shafts and qanat courses, and such methods are usually categorized under the studies of neural networks and machine learning.

In this research, the goal is to automatically detect qanats in the historical landscape of Zuzan city using convolutional neural networks and object detection with the YOLO algorithm, using aerial images from the 1940s and 1970s as input data. This research, using an analytical method in the form of a computational study of neural networks, aims to identify the qanats of Zuzan city to study the formation of the city and to answer these questions: 1- How is the process and accuracy of the convolutional network with the YOLO algorithm for detecting qanats and extracting them digitally from aerial images? 2- What impact have the qanats of the Zuzan plain, as the only source and distribution of water, had on the formation of Zuzan city?

The proposed model was trained with 80% training data, 20% validation data, with 200 iterations and a learning rate of 0.01. The results obtained from training the convolutional neural network show the effectiveness of aerial data in deep learning for the automatic extraction and identification of 4 qanat courses leading to the city of Zuzan in different directions, simultaneously, with an accuracy of 94%. In this region, these qanats are the main factor in the formation and life of Zuzan city during the historical and Islamic periods, and they are still in operation.

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Main Subjects

pazhoheshha-ye Bastan shenasi Iran

Articles in Press, Accepted Manuscript
Available Online from 17 March 2025

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