Abstract:

Craters are salient terrain features on planetary surfaces,and provide useful information about the relative dating ofgeological unit of planets. In addition, they are ideal landmarksfor spacecraft navigation. Due to low contrast and uneven illumination,automatic extraction of craters remains a challengingtask. This paper presents a saliency detection method for crateredges and a feature matching algorithm based on edges information.The craters are extracted through saliency edges detection,edge extraction and selection, feature matching of the same crateredges and robust ellipse fitting. In the edges matching algorithm,a crater feature model is proposed by analyzing the relationshipbetween highlight region edges and shadow region ones. Then,crater edges are paired through the effective matching algorithm.Experiments of real planetary images show that the proposedapproach is robust to different lights and topographies, and thedetection rate is larger than 90%.