The potential ancient graves in Northern Xinjiang of China almost appear into two types of circular marks: blob and ring marks with the faint boundary contrast on high resolution satellite imagery in Google Earth. In this paper

we proposed a circle detection method based on the local orientation using Genetic Algorithm （ GA） to extract them. Ours bases on the local orientation instead of the edge intensity

which was computed by the dominant component of the edge orientation histogram which is robust a gainst varying edge response. In our method

GA was used for robustness of circle detection against the shape disconnectedness

occlusions and other noises. We also used the geometric characteristic of the edge orientations at crossings of two circles to reduce the search space of GA for circle detection. The study was carried out on the unexcavated archaeological sites in the Northern X injiang of China. We compared our method to Hough Transform （ HT） method as the traditional robust circle detection. The r esults demonstrate that our method is much more robust against weak edge response and does not incur thresholds that are difficult to adjust automatically.