We have used a simple camera phone to significantly improve an `exploration system' for astrobiology and geology. This camera phone will make it much easier to develop and test computer-vision algorithms for future planetary exploration. We envision that the `Astrobiology Phone-cam' exploration system can be fruitfully used in other problem domains as well.
Deep Dive into The Cyborg Astrobiologist: Porting from a wearable computer to the Astrobiology Phone-cam.
Planetary exploration by autonomous robotic systems cannot be carried out successfully unless significant testing of the underlying computer vision algorithms is performed. In our previous work, we have demonstrated the use of a wearable computer system, the Cyborg Astrobiologist, capable of testing computer-vision algorithms as part of semi-autonomous exploration systems at remote geological and astrobiological field sites (McGuire et al., 2004(McGuire et al., , 2005)). In that work, we showed that the exploration system, which was based upon newly-developed 'uncommon maps' and previously-developed 'interest maps' (Rae et al., 1999;McGuire et al., 2002), could viably and robustly be utilized during remote field missions to localize interesting geochemical or hydrological features. Our system carries out the navigation process using the lower end of the spectral resolution, making use of three colour imagery to distinguish between regions of unusual colour. Navigation using higher spectral resolution spectrometry, for example, navigation based on mineralogical differences, will yield more interesting results but this is beyond the scope of the current work.
In this work, we report upon the development and initial field tests of one of the recent enhancements of the Cyborg Astrobiologist system, namely its porting from the wearable computer and connected video camera into a remote server and a camera phone (mobile phone with an inbuilt digital camera). By using a camera phone instead of a wearable computer, we offer the user several advantages including: considerable reduction in the equipment required during exploration (Figure 1), less special training to use the system, and access to higher-speed computational servers. However, the inbuilt cameras in mobile phones are small devices intended to provide basic image capturing facility. For this reason, camera phones do not allow the use of peripheral computer-controlled devices, such as a robotic pan-tilt mount, a zoom lens, or a digital microscope, posing a limit on the imaging capabilities. The camera-phone will also incur a modest increase in the time elapsed before the computer-vision results may be viewed. This is due to the fact that the phone cannot perform the necessary image processing and images must be transmitted to a remote server.
Although the quality of the cheaper camera-phone models cannot be compared with that of professional digital cameras, improvements in mobile-phone technologies are introducing significant improvements in the imaging capabilities of camera phones. In fact, the most recent camera phone models, such as Nokia’s E90, boast of a 3.2 Megapixel resolution with flash and autofocus features. This means that the image quality of camera phones may soon be comparable with that of digital cameras. The considerable reduction in the equipment required during field testing makes it easier for users to complete a remote field testing of the computer-vision exploration system.
Within this problem domain, the fruits of this project could be adapted to serve as the computer vision system for the microbot swarm for planetary surface and subsurface exploration, as envisioned by Dubowsky et al. (2005), or the lowest tier sensor-web of a multi-tier exploration system, as envisioned by Fink et al. (2005). Furthermore, such a camera-phone system could readily be adapted for a number of other applications or exploration algorithms beyond the application and algorithm which we have developed and tested.
This paper is structured as follows: Section 2 describes the integration of the camera phone with the Cyborg Astrobiologist system, Section 3 gives a description of the image processing involved, wherein we summarize our past work, whilst Section 4 gives the results obtained during initial field tests. Possible future work is presented in Section 5, finalizing the paper with Section 6 which presents the conclusions derived from this work.
Mobile technology has been developed over the years such that today even the cheapest mobile phones have an inbuilt digital camera and simple web-browsing capabilities. Advances in mobile communication also allow mobile users to exchange pictures using multimedia messaging service (MMS), which was originally intended as a fun and interesting alternative to normal communication. Camera-phones and MMS have been used to increase the communication between designers giving the possibility for designers to have remote access to software that interprets the designer’s drawing (Farrugia et al., 2004). A similar approach may be used for field exploration, allowing the user to explore a potential geological interesting site using just a camera-phone.
As shown in Figure 2, the field explorer takes an image of a geological or astrobiological scene using the camera-phone. This picture is then sent to a particular e-mail address, as a mail attachment, using MMS. A remote server is used to automatically and periodically c
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