Autonomous detection of volcanic plumes on outer planetary bodies

We experimentally evaluated the efficacy of various autonomous supervised classification techniques for detecting transient geophysical phenomena. We demonstrated methods of detecting volcanic plumes on the planetary satellites Io and Enceladus using spacecraft images from the Voyager, Galileo, New Horizons, and Cassini missions. We successfully detected 73–95% of known plumes in images from all four mission datasets.Additionally, we showed that the same techniques are applicable to differentiating geologic features, such as plumes and mountains, which exhibit similar appearances in images.