Autonomous Spectral Discovery and Mapping Onboard the EO-1 Spacecraft

作者：Thompson David R^*; Bornstein Benjamin J; Chien Steve A; Schaffer Steven; Tran Daniel; Bue Brian D; Castano Rebecca; Gleeson Damhnait F; Noell Aaron

来源：IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 2013, 51(6): 3567-3579.

DOI：10.1109/TGRS.2012.2226040

• Endmember detection
• hyperspectral imagery
• mineralogy
• pattern recognition
• remote planetary geology
• spacecraft autonomy

Imaging spectrometers are valuable instruments for space exploration, but their large data volumes limit the number of scenes that can be downlinked. Missions could improve science yield by acquiring surplus images and analyzing them onboard the spacecraft. This onboard analysis could generate surficial maps, summarizing scenes in a bandwidth-efficient manner to indicate data cubes that warrant a complete downlink. Additionally, onboard analysis could detect targets of opportunity and trigger immediate automated follow-up measurements by the spacecraft. Here, we report a first step toward these goals with demonstrations of fully automatic hyperspectral scene analysis, feature discovery, and mapping onboard the Earth Observing One (EO-1) spacecraft. We describe a series of overflights in which the spacecraft analyzes a scene and produces summary maps along with lists of salient features for prioritized downlink. The onboard system uses a superpixel endmember detection approach to identify compositionally distinctive features in each image. This procedure suits the limited computing resources of the EO-1 flight processor. It requires very little advance information about the anticipated spectral features, but the resulting surface composition maps agree well with canonical human interpretations. Identical spacecraft commands detect outlier spectral features in multiple scenarios having different constituents and imaging conditions.

• 出版日期2013-6