Anomaly detection in Martian Surface — Searching for needles in a haystack!

Overcoming data challenges and using deep convolutional networks and community collaboration to detect anomalies on Mars.

I got this wonderful opportunity to work on the Omdena AI challenge “Anomaly detection in Martian Surface”. The objective of this project is to detect the Anomalies on the martian (MARS) surface caused by non-terrestrial artifacts like derbies of MARS lander missions, rovers, etc.

In the past, I have attempted a few competitions in ‘Kaggle’ and ‘AnalyticsVidya’, even though it helped me improve my understanding on the AI domain, I felt the learning exposure is limited due to the context of competition. When I came across ‘Omdena’ their tag line of ‘learn by collaboration’ got me interested at once. I believe the best learning happens when we work together as a team with a common goal. What I learned in the past couple of months in this AI challenge is much more than what I learned from all the competitions combined.

Recently the search for so-called “Techno-Signatures” — measurable properties or effect that provide scientific evidence of past or present extraterrestrial technology, has gained new interests. NASA hosted a “Techno-Signature” Workshop at the Lunar and…