Knowledge distillation with Segment Anything (SAM) model for Planetary Geological Mapping

Planetary science research involves analysing vast amounts of remote sensing data, which are often costly and time-consuming to annotate and process. One of the essential tasks in this field is geological mapping, which requires identifying and outlining regions of interest in planetary images, including geological features and landforms. However, manually labelling these images is a complex and challenging task that requires significant domain expertise and effort. To expedite this endeavour, we propose the use of knowledge distillation using the recently introduced cutting-edge Segment Anything (SAM) model. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this prompt-based foundation model for rapid annotation and quick adaptability to a prime use case of mapping planetary skylights. Our work reveals that with a small set of annotations obtained with the right prompts from the model and subsequently training a specialised domain decoder, we can achieve satisfactory semantic segmentation on this task. Key results indicate that the use of knowledge distillation can significantly reduce the effort required by domain experts for manual annotation and improve the efficiency of image segmentation tasks. This approach has the potential to accelerate extra-terrestrial discovery by automatically detecting and segmenting Martian landforms.