DARPA, U.S. Geological Survey detail critical mineral competition

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) officials have collaborated to offer a competition to expeditiously aid critical mineral resources assessment initiatives.

The AI for Critical Mineral Assessment Competition stems from the nation’s dependence on raw, non-fuel materials known as critical minerals to manufacture products, ranging from rare earth minerals in electric motors and generators to the carbon fiber used for airplanes, considered essential to national security.

“The USGS’s critical mineral resource assessments are at the heart of our domestic supply and production of critical minerals,” said Anne Fischer, deputy director of DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office. “We want to have a measurable, immediate impact on the USGS’s ability to reach some of its objectives, especially in ways that are critical to national security.”

Per DARPA and the USGS, the competition solicits solutions for automatically extracting and georeferencing features from scanned or raster maps and includes two independent challenges.

The Map Georeferencing Challenge involves accurately geolocating a map of an unknown location and coordinate system by fitting coordinate points referenced to known locations in one or more base maps, while the Map Feature Extraction Challenge in which participants will be provided a training set consisting of maps with each legend item labeled and characterized and a binary pixel map reflecting the feature’s coverage in the map. The goal is to identify all features in a map that appear in the map’s legend, per officials.

DARPA will award $10,000 for the first prize, $3,000 for the second prize, and $1,000 for the third prize in October 2022 for each challenge.