photoxels
In the study and search for life in the universe, astrobiologists are inundated with tremendous amount of images from other planets, i.e. data overload.
Recently, Patrick McGuire (Freie Universität, Berlin) and his astrobiology team of researchers from Malta, Spain and the United States, created the ‘Cyborg Astrobiologist’ which is a “novel, hybrid part-human, part-machine visual system” that uses a simple mobile phone camera” to help crunch the data/ images and facilitate the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.
At McGuire et al’s field test in West Virginia, USA, the Astrobiology phone-camera system sends images wirelessly by Bluetooth communications to a nearby laptop computer to automatically build an image libary with examples of different terrain for the image compression analysis.
- The phone-camera for McGuire et al’s field test was a Samsung SGH A767 with 1280×960 RGB color images.
- The laptop was a Dell Inspiron 9300.
The Cyborg Astrobiologist’s image-compression system involves the following key functions:
- compressing images,
- detecting novel colors and textures in a series of images, and
- alerting the human user to the similarity of a new image to a previously-observed texture.
McGuire said, “We are now working to speed up the image compression analysis and put the whole system onto a smartphone — and eventually onto a Mars rover!”
The researchers explained that via the Cyborg Astrobiologist as an extraterrestrial robotic image-acquisition system autonomously taking many images, sudden changes or exceptions in the environment could be flagged and reported to the human astrobiologists on Earth, effectively scanning the immense number of images for anomalies (possibly of astrobiological interest) [scientific literature is a pdf].
You can read the story at Astrobiology Magazine: ‘Cyborg Astrobiologist’ Uses Phone-Cam to Search for Life.
