PRoViDE - Planetary Robotics Vision Data Exploitation

An EU collaborative project in the frame of FP7-SPACE-2012-1
Starting date: Jan 1st, 2013
Project duration: 36 months

PRoViDE is a collaborative project to exploit the great wealth of existing and forthcoming image
data from space missions by creating a unified database and a standard set of processing tools. As
well as combining existing imagery to create new, richer contexts, the tools produce by PRoViDE
will also enable highly realistic synthetic images of planetary surfaces to be created, for use in
both scientific investigation and in mission planning & operations for future space missions.

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 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 multi- resolution 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.

PRoViDE aims to

1. Complete relevant 3D vision processing of planetary surface missions, covering all relevant
   robotic sites of recent and ongoing missions such as Surveyor, Viking, Pathfinder, MER, MSL,
   Phoenix, Huygens, and Lunar ground-level panoramas & stereoscopic & multiscopic images from
   Apollo and Russian Lunokhod and selected Luna missions, as far as available.
2. Provide highest resolution & accuracy remote sensing (orbital) vision data processing results for
   these mission sites to embed the robotic imagery and its products into spatial planetary context.
3. Collect 3D Vision processing results and remote sensing products within a single coherent spatial
   data base.
4. Realize the seamless fusion between orbital and ground vision data of recent, ongoing and future
   missions (e.g. MSL and HiRISE).
5. Demonstrate the potential of existing and forthcoming planetary surface vision data by
   maximising image quality visualisation, based on a 3D publishing platform.
6. Collect and formulate use cases for novel scientific application scenarios making use of the
   newly introduced spatial relationships and presentation means.
7. Demonstrate the processing & data base concept during independent MSL data evaluation &
   visualisation campaigns.
8. Exploit & bundle recent European (including Russian) and US initiatives in the field of Planetary
   Robotics Vision (PRoVisG, PRoViScout, a NASA SALMON project targeting to support ExoMars
   image-based localization, ExoMars PanCam, MER image-based localization, and similar actions
   in the forthcoming MSL mission).
9. Realize on-line dissemination of key data & its presentation by means of a web-based GIS and
   rendering tool.