Understanding underwater archaeological scenarios by optical and acoustic sensing tools

Underwater seafloors represent a huge archive of manmade artefacts, a cultural heritage whose abandon process started since man has been able to travel by the waters. In order to put this heritage under safeguard and preservation archaeologists require and request for technological support provided by the scientific community. Automated procedures tailored for the purposes of manmade object recognition in the underwater scenario represent the main topic discussed in this work. In particular the authors propose a set of procedures that enables to extract meaningful insights about the inspected environment and that can be exploited to assign a label of interest, in terms of cultural significance, to the surveyed areas. Furthermore the authors introduce a sketch of a framework according to which the identification of interesting areas on the seafloor may be implemented in terms of a Bayes decision system.