United States of America As Represented by the Administrator of Nasa

Gabriele Moser

Sebastiano Serpico

David Solarna

Jacqueline J Le Moigne-Stewart

Jon Atli Benediktsson

Alberto Gotelli

Jacqueline J LeMoigne-Stewart

Giulia Troglio

The present invention relates to a novel method and system for crater detection in planetary data based on marked point processes (MPP), effective for various object detection tasks in Earth observation, and for planetary image registration. The resulting spatial features are exploited for registration, together with fitness functions based on the MPP energy, on the mean directed Hausdorff distance, and on the mutual information. Two different methods&#x2014;one based on birth-death processes and region-of-interest analysis, and the other based on graph cuts and decimated wavelets&#x2014;are included within the present framework. Experimental results confirmed the effectiveness of the present invention in terms of crater detection performance and sub-pixel registration accuracy.

System and method of crater detection and registration using marked point processes, multiple birth and death methods and region-based analysis

A method for the extraction of Lunar data and/or planetary features is provided. The feature extraction method can include one or more image processing techniques, including, but not limited to, a watershed segmentation and/or the generalized Hough Transform. According to some embodiments, the feature extraction method can include extracting features, such as, small rocks. According to some embodiments, small rocks can be extracted by applying a watershed segmentation algorithm to the Canny gradient. According to some embodiments, applying a watershed segmentation algorithm to the Canny gradient can allow regions that appear as close contours in the gradient to be segmented.

Automatic extraction of planetary image features

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Genoa, Italy

Gabriele Moser