Drive By Science

Annabelle’s research will focus on training image captioning datasets for the Drive By Science Project taking place in NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Mars Rover Artificial Intelligence (AI) division.

The Drive by Science Project addresses a critical issue: the Mars Rover produces substantially more images than can be sent down to Earth, due to the limited Mars to Earth bandwidth. To combat this, the Drive by Science Project is developing an AI algorithm that converts images the Mars Rover captures to descriptive text captions. Since text captions require significantly less bandwidth than images, scientists on Earth will increase their Mars observation density from 200 images/day to 1,000,000 image-captions/day. Additionally, these descriptive captions enable the Mars Rover to have an on board database with content based search – allowing scientists on earth to selectively retrieve images of interest from Mars, instead of getting a random batch of images from Mars daily.

Faculty Supervisor:

Kenneth McIsaac

Student:

Partner:

California Institute of Technology

Discipline:

Engineering

Sector:

Education

University:

The University of Western Ontario

Program: