AI to map new territories on moon

New technique has been developed to locate and count craters

Scientists have developed a new technique based on artificial intelligence (AI) to count craters on the moon. “When it comes to counting craters on the moon, it’s a pretty archaic method,” said Mohamad Ali-Dib from the University of Toronto, Scarborough in Canada.

“Basically we need to manually look at an image, locate and count the craters and then calculate how large they are based off the size of the image. Here we’ve developed a technique from artificial intelligence that can automate this entire process that saves significant time and effort,” Ali-Dib said.

Researchers have tried in the past to develop algorithms that could identify and count lunar craters but when they were used on new, previously unseen patches of craters they tended to perform poorly.

By comparison, the technique developed by Ali-Dib and his colleagues can generalise very well to unseen lunar patches, and even other cratered bodies like Mercury. “It’s the first time we have an algorithm that can detect craters really well for not only parts of the moon, but also areas of Mercury,” said Ali-Dib.

In order to determine its accuracy, the researchers first trained the neural network on a large data set covering two thirds of the moon, and then tested their trained network on the remaining third of the moon.

–PTI