{
"id": "r01_giza_controls",
"order": 11,
"tag": "null",
"eyebrow": "01 \u00b7 Within-image controls",
"title": "Monuments and open desert give the same answer in the same acquisition",
"question": "Does the method distinguish the pyramids from empty plateau in the very image that produced the claim?",
"finding": "It does not. Across 191,520 pixels on four monuments and 95,760 pixels on two stretches of open plateau in the same acquisition, the mean structure score is 0.2798 on the monuments against 0.2803 on the desert, a standardised difference of -0.007, and it runs the wrong way. The Kolmogorov-Smirnov distance between Khafre and the controls is 0.008. Such a test returns a small p-value here only because the pixel count is large; the separation itself is under one percent of the score range. The depth histograms and mean depth profiles have the same shape everywhere, and this bank's depth axis folds back at 13.7 m.",
"limitations": "Pixels inside a patch are not independent, so no p-value here should be read as a detection rate. This reproduces the published processing chain as described, on the same class of data, at patches we chose. It does not reproduce a specific published figure, because the bank parameters behind those figures were never disclosed. A difference in these statistics would not have proved a chamber either; it would have started a search for a surface cause.",
"method": "ICEYE X33 Spotlight Dwell Fine, Giza, 27 August 2025, VV. Six patches of 4096 by 1536 native samples located by the product's rational polynomial model. Sub-aperture bank of 50 reference/offset pairs at half the processed bandwidth with an 88 Hz offset, 32 by 32 complex cross-correlation to a thousandth of a pixel, scene-median common mode removed, steering wavenumbers from the product's own state vectors, depth grid to the ambiguity limit.",
"figures": [
{
"file": "/Users/eugene/prj/sar/results/r01_giza_controls/figs/r01_amplitude.png",
"caption": "The six patches. Amplitude of the native complex image on the analysis grid, geolocated by the product's own rational polynomial model with no fitted offset. Four monuments and two stretches of open plateau, all from the same pass, the same processor and the same 25 seconds. Every comparison that follows uses these six and nothing else."
},
{
"file": "/Users/eugene/prj/sar/results/r01_giza_controls/figs/r01_score.png",
"caption": "Spot the monument. For every pixel, the best score the depth-focusing step achieves at any depth, drawn on a common scale. If the method were responding to structure beneath the monuments, these six panels would not look alike. The pyramids occupy the first three panels and the open plateau the last two."
},
{
"file": "/Users/eugene/prj/sar/results/r01_giza_controls/figs/r01_distributions.png",
"caption": "The same distributions everywhere. Solid lines are monuments, dashed lines are open plateau. Left: the per-pixel structure score. Middle: the depth each pixel is assigned. Right: the mean depth profile of each patch. The depth axis here runs to the ambiguity limit of this bank, which is under fifteen metres."
}
],
"metrics": {
"bank": "paper",
"patches": [
{
"patch": "khafre",
"label": "Khafre pyramid",
"kind": "monument",
"pixels": 47880,
"amplitude_median": 67.65444946289062,
"amplitude_p99": 320.5234375,
"trajectory_rms_px": 0.0028363345190882683,
"velocity_kind": "velocity_increment_over_pair_lag",
"velocity_rms_mm_s": 0.001572190667502582,
"best_score_mean": 0.27953147888183594,
"best_score_p95": 0.40796318650245667,
"frac_score_gt_0p5": 0.005409356725146199,
"depth_median_m": 6.800354936385067,
"spectrum_peak_to_median": 1.2234102487564087,
"nyquist_depth_m": 13.676835656139211
},
{
"patch": "khufu",
"label": "Khufu pyramid",
"kind": "monument",
"pixels": 47880,
"amplitude_median": 70.02801513671875,
"amplitude_p99": 322.09063720703125,
"trajectory_rms_px": 0.0028831264935433865,
"velocity_kind": "velocity_increment_over_pair_lag",
"velocity_rms_mm_s": 0.0015977466246113181,
"best_score_mean": 0.2795983552932739,
"best_score_p95": 0.4088711738586426,
"frac_score_gt_0p5": 0.005618212197159566,
"depth_median_m": 6.728940623128769,
"spectrum_peak_to_median": 1.2517257928848267,
"nyquist_depth_m": 13.700220044209356
},
{
"patch": "menkaure",
"label": "Menkaure pyramid",
"kind": "monument",
"pixels": 47880,
"amplitude_median": 78.29562377929688,
"amplitude_p99": 294.9462585449219,
"trajectory_rms_px": 0.002896288875490427,
"velocity_kind": "velocity_increment_over_pair_lag",
"velocity_rms_mm_s": 0.0016056513413786888,
"best_score_mean": 0.28030067682266235,
"best_score_p95": 0.41230130195617676,
"frac_score_gt_0p5": 0.006453634085213033,
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"spectrum_peak_to_median": 1.2317594289779663,
"nyquist_depth_m": 13.657413825418601
},
{
"patch": "sphinx",
"label": "Sphinx and temples",
"kind": "monument",
"pixels": 47880,
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"amplitude_p99": 260.11187744140625,
"trajectory_rms_px": 0.002973557449877262,
"velocity_kind": "velocity_increment_over_pair_lag",
"velocity_rms_mm_s": 0.0016473907744511962,
"best_score_mean": 0.27996766567230225,
"best_score_p95": 0.4115777909755707,
"frac_score_gt_0p5": 0.006056808688387635,
"depth_median_m": 6.485383584003933,
"spectrum_peak_to_median": 1.3580355644226074,
"nyquist_depth_m": 13.711990822866598
},
{
"patch": "desert_west",
"label": "Open plateau, west",
"kind": "control",
"pixels": 47880,
"amplitude_median": 97.86257934570312,
"amplitude_p99": 342.6143798828125,
"trajectory_rms_px": 0.002811290556564927,
"velocity_kind": "velocity_increment_over_pair_lag",
"velocity_rms_mm_s": 0.001559231081046164,
"best_score_mean": 0.2809273302555084,
"best_score_p95": 0.40850722789764404,
"frac_score_gt_0p5": 0.005910609857978279,
"depth_median_m": 6.845288895016874,
"spectrum_peak_to_median": 1.091910719871521,
"nyquist_depth_m": 13.601398807287854
},
{
"patch": "desert_south",
"label": "Open plateau, south",
"kind": "control",
"pixels": 47880,
"amplitude_median": 68.00326538085938,
"amplitude_p99": 207.58702087402344,
"trajectory_rms_px": 0.0027043421287089586,
"velocity_kind": "velocity_increment_over_pair_lag",
"velocity_rms_mm_s": 0.0014993962831795216,
"best_score_mean": 0.27972301840782166,
"best_score_p95": 0.407758504152298,
"frac_score_gt_0p5": 0.005701754385964913,
"depth_median_m": 6.862568059286237,
"spectrum_peak_to_median": 1.1489453315734863,
"nyquist_depth_m": 13.635732026511855
}
],
"monument_mean": 0.2798495590686798,
"control_mean": 0.28032517433166504,
"pooled_sd": 0.0717650055885315,
"cohens_d": -0.006627398077398539,
"effect_note": "With hundreds of thousands of dependent pixels a p-value measures sample size, not importance; the standardised effect is the number to read.",
"monument_pixels": 191520,
"control_pixels": 95760,
"ks_statistic_monuments_vs_controls": 0.009147869674185474,
"ks_pvalue": 4.5498789221237175e-05,
"ks_statistic_khafre_vs_controls": 0.007936507936507936,
"ks_pvalue_khafre": 0.03567368790949055,
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"sub_aperture_s": 12.248243180155795,
"pair_lag_ms": 13.754343829484329,
"overlap_within_pair": 0.9988770353733858,
"acquisition": {
"path": "/Users/eugene/tmp/sar/giza/ICEYE_X33_SLC_SLEDF_951562307_20250827T202654.h5",
"satellite": "ICEYE-X33",
"product_type": "SpotlightDwellFine",
"polarization": "VV",
"look_side": "right",
"orbit_direction": "ASCENDING",
"shape": [
113692,
11562
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"prf_hz": 159478.0982027784,
"azimuth_time_interval_s": 6.27045350596348e-06,
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"slant_range_first_m": 606873.6299081678,
"incidence_center_deg": 20.805111922042048,
"scene_height_m": 71.6567153930664,
"collection_start": "2025-08-27T20:26:54.327037",
"collection_end": "2025-08-27T20:27:19.089845",
"zero_doppler_start": "2025-08-27T20:27:06.231765",
"zero_doppler_end": "2025-08-27T20:27:06.944666",
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"image_span_s": 0.712901
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"runtime_s": 2.346830129623413
},
"date": "2026-09-23"
}