Global detection of large lunar craters based on the CE-1 digital elevation model

Craters, one of the most significant features of the lunar surface, have been widely researched because they offer us the relative age of the surface unit as well as crucial geological information. Research on crater detec- tion algorithms （CDAs） of the Moon and other planetary bodies has concentrated on detecting them from imagery data, but the computational cost of detecting large craters using images makes these CDAs impractical. This paper presents a new approach to crater detection that utilizes a digital elevation model instead of images; this enables fully automatic global detection of large craters. Craters were delineated by terrain attributes, and then thresholding maps of terrain attributes were used to transform topographic data into a binary image, finally craters were detected by using the Hough Transform from the binary image. By using the proposed algorithm, we produced a catalog of all craters ≥ 10 km in diameter on the lunar surface and analyzed their distribution and population characteristics.

Aspect in Topography to Enhance Fine-detailed Landform Element Extraction on High-resolution DEM

The value of the high-resolution data lies in the high-precision information discovery.The fine-detailed landform element extraction is thus the basis of high-fidelity application of the high-resolution digital elevation models(DEMs).However,the results of landform element extraction generated by classical methods might be ungrounded on high-resolution DEMs.This paper presents our research on using the aspect to reinforce the applicability and robustness of the classical approaches in landform element extraction.First,according to the research of pattern recognition,we assume that aspect-enhanced landform representation is robust to rotation,scaling and affine variance.To testify the role of aspect,we respectively integrated the aspect into three classical approaches:mean curvaturebased fuzzy classification,elevation-based feature descriptor,and object-based segmentation.In the experiment,based on four types of high-resolution DEMs(1 m,2 m,4 m and 8 m),we compare each classical approaches and their corresponding aspect-enhanced approaches based on extracting the rims of two craters having different landforms,and the ridgelines and valleylines of a region covered by few vegetables and man-made buildings.In comparison to the results generated by curvature-based fuzzy classification,the aspect enhanced curvature-based fuzzy classification can effectively filter a number of noises outperforms the curvature-based one.Otherwise,the aspect-enhanced feature descriptor can detect more landform elements than the elevation-based feature descriptor.Moreover,the aspect-based segmentation can detect the main structure of landform,while the boundaries segmented by classical approaches are messing and meaningless.The systematic experiments on meter-level resolution DEMs proved that the aspect in topography could effectively to improve the classical method-system,including fuzzy-based classification,feature descriptors-based detection and object-based segmentation.The value of aspect is significantly great to be worthy of attentions in landform representation.

Method of Passive Image Based Crater Autonomous Detection

Impact craters are commonly found on the surface of planets, satellites, asteroids, and other solar system bodies. The applica- tion field of crater detection algorithm ranges from estimation of planetary surface age to autonomous landing on planets and advanced statistical analyses. this article introduced a method of passive image based crater autonomous detection. Candidate area, is defined as a small rectangular region including craters. The criterion to select a candidate area is there being one or a f...

Novel approach of crater detection by crater candidate region selection and matrix-pattern-oriented least squares support vector machine

Impacted craters are commonly found on the surface of planets, satellites, asteroids and other solar system bodies. In order to speed up the rate of constructing the database of craters, it is important to develop crater detection algorithms. This paper presents a novel approach to automatically detect craters on planetary surfaces. The approach contains two parts： crater candidate region selection and crater detection. In the first part, crater candidate region selection is achieved by Kanade-Lucas-Tomasi （KLT） detector. Matrix-pattern-oriented least squares support vector machine （MatLSSVM）, as the matrixization version of least square support vector machine （SVM）, inherits the advantages of least squares support vector machine （LSSVM）, reduces storage space greatly and reserves spatial redundancies within each image matrix compared with general LSSVM. The second part of the approach employs MatLSSVM to design classifier for crater detection. Experimental results on the dataset which comprises 160 preprocessed image patches from Google Mars demonstrate that the accuracy rate of crater detection can be up to 88%. In addition, the outstanding feature of the approach introduced in this paper is that it takes resized crater candidate region as input pattern directly to finish crater detection. The results of the last experiment demonstrate that MatLSSVM-based classifier can detect crater regions effectively on the basis of KLT-based crater candidate region selection.