Planetary Robotics Vision Data Exploitation

Contract N°: 312377 Starting Date: 01/01/2013 Duration: 36 months
PRoViDE Overview 2014-01-15
PRoViDE Plenary Exploitation Event Dec2nd 2015 Vienna (program)

The international community of planetary science and exploration has successfully launched, landed and operated about thirty human and robotic missions to the planets and the Moon. They have collected differing numbers of surface imagery that have only been partially utilized throughout these missions and thereafter for further scientific application purposes. Very few attempts have been made so far to bring these data into a unified spatial context (including the orbiter data available for most of them, in various quality and resolutions), or to exploit spatial relationships implicit in these images but not designed in the immediate scope of the individual missions.

PRoViDE (Planetary Robotics Vision Data Exploitation) will assemble a major portion of the imaging data gathered so far from vehicles and probes on planetary surfaces into an unique database, bringing them into a spatial context and providing access to a complete set of 3D vision products. The 3D vision processing will complement a front-end from a multiresolution visualisation engine that combines various levels of detail to realize a seamless and immersive real-time access to dynamically rendered 3D representations of the captured scenes.

The technical and scientific outcome of the Project is made available to the academic community by means of a sophisticated real-time hierarchical rendering tool, and to the public by a web-based rendering interface that presents the PRoViDE processing results making use of selected rendering functions adapted for use across the Internet. A Summer School close to the end of the Project will allow students and members of the vision & planetary scientific communities to learn about the PRoViDE project, evaluate its results and, most importantly, gain a new insight into past, recent and contemporaneous robotic missions throughout the whole Solar System.