ArchaeoTrace
Local-first contour tracing for historical maps with optional AI assistance and experimental DEM reconstruction.
ArchaeoTrace helps users digitize elevation contours from scanned historical maps and review locally generated terrain hypotheses.
Features:
- Multi-scale 9/15/31px Ink Centerline with a bounded 320px direction-aware Live-Wire
- Literal 0-100% cursor/path coordinate blending; green preview shows the path accepted by the next click
- Optional Smart Recovery for weak Ink segments; default OFF with an explicitly installed EfficientSAM-Ti model
- Freehand plus LSD, HED, MobileSAM, SAM (ViT-B), and Legacy Canny under Advanced / Legacy methods
- Elevation attributes and optional spot-height capture
- Experimental linear-TIN DEM and hillshade generation from saved elevation data
- Developer-only reproducible benchmarks with publication ranking disabled until independent review
External dependencies: default Ink and Freehand use NumPy supplied by QGIS.
SciPy and scikit-image are optional Ink optimizations. Smart Recovery requires
ONNX Runtime and separately installed fixed-hash weights. LSD, HED, and SAM
require OpenCV; MobileSAM and full SAM additionally require requests,
PyTorch, their pinned backend package, and separately downloaded weights.
Installation commands and platform notes are in the linked homepage README.
QGIS 3.22/Python 3.8 remains a source and no-pip contract target; optional
pip stacks require Python 3.10 or newer. See the release-readiness record
for the exact locally executed and configured-but-not-run QGIS matrix.
Processing is local-first and map data is not sent to a remote inference service.
Model downloads and missing-model source checks are user-initiated network actions.
Terrain outputs are reviewable hypotheses rather than archaeological ground truth.