Automated Dust Devil Detection on Mars

Abstract

A system for automated dust devil detection on Mars is developed based on images taken by the navigation camera aboard the Mars Exploration Rover, Spirit. This system enables us to pick up dust devils from the large number of images without checking each image visually and affords us a powerful tool for searching for dust devils and revealing their statistical properties for scientific studies. From an engineering point of view, the volume of dust devil image data to be downlinked to Earth for dust devil studies can also be drastically reduced by automated detection of dust devils because we can trim dust devil regions on the images onboard. A simple performance test using images taken on a particular sol shows that this system can detect almost all of the dust devils though also includes some false positives. Precision and recall are 0.85 and 0.81, respectively, which are comparable with or more effective than those in previous studies.