Mapping "Brain Terrain" Regions on Mars using Deep Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Pearson, Kyle A., Noe, Eldar, Zhao, Daniel, Altinok, Alphan, Morgan, Alex
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Pearson, Kyle A.
Noe, Eldar
Zhao, Daniel
Altinok, Alphan
Morgan, Alex
author_facet Pearson, Kyle A.
Noe, Eldar
Zhao, Daniel
Altinok, Alphan
Morgan, Alex
contents One of the main objectives of the Mars Exploration Program is to search for evidence of past or current life on the planet. To achieve this, Mars exploration has been focusing on regions that may have liquid or frozen water. A set of critical areas may have seen cycles of ice thawing in the relatively recent past in response to periodic changes in the obliquity of Mars. In this work, we use convolutional neural networks to detect surface regions containing "Brain Coral" terrain, a landform on Mars whose similarity in morphology and scale to sorted stone circles on Earth suggests that it may have formed as a consequence of freeze/thaw cycles. We use large images (~100-1000 megapixels) from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to search for these landforms at resolutions close to a few tens of centimeters per pixel (~25--50 cm). Over 52,000 images (~28 TB) were searched (~5% of the Martian surface) where we found detections in over 200 images. To expedite the processing we leverage a classifier network (prior to segmentation) in the Fourier domain that can take advantage of JPEG compression by leveraging blocks of coefficients from a discrete cosine transform in lieu of decoding the entire image at the full spatial resolution. The hybrid pipeline approach maintains ~93% accuracy while cutting down on ~95% of the total processing time compared to running the segmentation network at the full resolution on every image. The timely processing of big data sets helps inform mission operations, geologic surveys to prioritize candidate landing sites, avoid hazardous areas, or map the spatial extent of certain terrain. The segmentation masks and source code are available on Github for the community to explore and build upon.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2311_12292
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Mapping "Brain Terrain" Regions on Mars using Deep Learning
Pearson, Kyle A.
Noe, Eldar
Zhao, Daniel
Altinok, Alphan
Morgan, Alex
Earth and Planetary Astrophysics
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
Machine Learning
Image and Video Processing
One of the main objectives of the Mars Exploration Program is to search for evidence of past or current life on the planet. To achieve this, Mars exploration has been focusing on regions that may have liquid or frozen water. A set of critical areas may have seen cycles of ice thawing in the relatively recent past in response to periodic changes in the obliquity of Mars. In this work, we use convolutional neural networks to detect surface regions containing "Brain Coral" terrain, a landform on Mars whose similarity in morphology and scale to sorted stone circles on Earth suggests that it may have formed as a consequence of freeze/thaw cycles. We use large images (~100-1000 megapixels) from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to search for these landforms at resolutions close to a few tens of centimeters per pixel (~25--50 cm). Over 52,000 images (~28 TB) were searched (~5% of the Martian surface) where we found detections in over 200 images. To expedite the processing we leverage a classifier network (prior to segmentation) in the Fourier domain that can take advantage of JPEG compression by leveraging blocks of coefficients from a discrete cosine transform in lieu of decoding the entire image at the full spatial resolution. The hybrid pipeline approach maintains ~93% accuracy while cutting down on ~95% of the total processing time compared to running the segmentation network at the full resolution on every image. The timely processing of big data sets helps inform mission operations, geologic surveys to prioritize candidate landing sites, avoid hazardous areas, or map the spatial extent of certain terrain. The segmentation masks and source code are available on Github for the community to explore and build upon.
title Mapping "Brain Terrain" Regions on Mars using Deep Learning
topic Earth and Planetary Astrophysics
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
Machine Learning
Image and Video Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.12292