{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/automated-discovery-of-anomalous-features-in","title":"Automated Discovery of Anomalous Features in Ultra-Large Planetary Remote Sensing Datasets using Variational Autoencoders","arxiv_id":"2403.07424","date":"2024-03-12","proceeding":null,"authors":["Adam Lesnikowski","Valentin T. Bickel","Daniel Angerhausen"],"abstract":"The NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has returned petabytes of lunar high spatial resolution surface imagery over the past decade, impractical for humans to fully review manually. Here we develop an automated method using a deep generative visual model that rapidly retrieves scientifically interesting examples of LRO surface imagery representing the first planetary image anomaly detector. We give quantitative experimental evidence that our method preferentially retrieves anomalous samples such as notable geological features and known human landing and spacecraft crash sites. Our method addresses a major capability gap in planetary science and presents a novel way to unlock insights hidden in ever-increasing remote sensing data archives, with numerous applications to other science domains. We publish our code and data along with this paper.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.07424v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2403.07424v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"automated-discovery-of-anomalous-features-in","repo_url":"https://github.com/lesnikow/jstars-automated-discovery","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}