Localization and Classification of Venusian Volcanoes Using Image Detection Algorithms

Imaging is one of the main tools of modern astronomy—many images are collected each day, and they must be processed. Processing such a large amount of images can be complex, time-consuming, and may require advanced tools. One of the techniques that may be employed is artificial intelligence (AI)-based image detection and classification. In this paper, the research is focused on developing such a system for the problem of the Magellan dataset, which contains 134 satellite images of Venus’s surface with individual volcanoes marked with circular labels. Volcanoes are classified into four classes depending on their features. In this paper, the authors apply the You-Only-Look-Once (YOLO) algorithm, which is based on a convolutional neural network (CNN). To apply this technique, the original labels are first converted into a suitable YOLO format. Then, due to the relatively small number of images in the dataset, deterministic augmentation techniques are applied. Hyperparameters of the YOLO network are tuned to achieve the best results, which are evaluated as mean average precision (mAP@0.5) for localization accuracy and F1 score for classification accuracy. The experimental results using cross-vallidation indicate that the proposed method achieved 0.835 mAP@0.5 and 0.826 F1 scores, respectively.