In recent decades, with the placement of LiDAR remote sensing instruments in orbit, we now have global coverage of the bare-ground elevation on the Earth, Mars and beyond. Encoded in such planetary LiDAR data are interesting landscape features that promise to further our knowledge of planetary topography. However, discovery of such features entails 3 major challenges: 1) massive data; 2) the need for local multi-scale features; 3) sensitivity to interfering factors. To address these challenges, we propose FARMYARD, a generic pipeline for \underline{F}e\underline{a}ture Discove\underline{r}y Fro\underline{m} Planetar\underline{y} LiD\underline{AR} \underline{D}ata Data. To our knowledge, this is the first time such a pipeline has been proposed, which provides a brand new methodology for comparative studies of planetary topography. Specifically, drawing on the parallel computing power of the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), we propose a novel pseudo-on-pass sweep (POPS) framework for fast and memory-efficient feature extraction for massive planetary LiDAR data, a two-level division scheme for local regions with support for multi-scale features, and a Domain-Shifted Partition (DSP) scheme for feature evaluation that is robust against interfering factors. To showcase the utility of our FARMYARD pipeline, we deploy it to a real-world research project, which seeks to find topographical signatures of life by discovering features that can potentially distinguish between the Earth and alien worlds with no known life activity. We also highlight the efficiency of our POPS framework with experiments on both synthetic and real data, which can be thousands of times faster than its CPU-based counterpart, including a multi-core parallel solution.
