CNN‐based novelty detection for terrestrial and extra‐terrestrial autonomous exploration

Novelty detection is concerned with detecting features that do not belong to any known class or are not well represented by existing models. Ergo, in autonomous navigation novelty detection determines whether an input camera frame contains certain entities of high interest which do not correspond to a known category. One of the key requirements for the future space exploration missions is the reduction of the information to be transferred back to Earth. Thus, novelty detection techniques have been developed to select the subset of acquired images with significant measurements that justify utilisation of the limited bandwidth from the available information link. Such methods are based on the identification of salient regions, which are then evaluated against a set of trained classifiers. We explore a novelty detection approach, based on the reasoning properties of Neural Networks, which follow the same guidelines while also being trainable in an end‐to‐end manner. This characteristic allows for the intertwined optimisation of the individual components leading to a closer estimation of a global solution. Our experiments reveal that the proposed novelty detection system achieves better performance, as compared to hand‐crafted techniques, when the learning and testing examples refer to similar environments.