Research Article Open Access

AUTOMATIC CRATER DETECTION ON LUNAR SURFACE

Abstract

This paper focuses on automatic identification of lunar craters in the context of safe landing site identification. Craters appear on the lunar surface in high density and are the most interesting features of any planetary surface. In this paper, the technique presented is for crater detection and fitting an ellipse after determining the position and orientation of the craters. Image smoothing is optional as it is done to extract crater features greater than a specified size from the image. Morphology gradient technique is used in this approach to extract edges belonging to craters only. Ellipse is fitted on the edge map using least square error and square completion method. This algorithm is tested on different datasets of Chandrayaan-1 TMC and LRO (NAC) and results are compared with manually detected craters.

Amee Jain , Suresh K, Darshak Thakore, Narendra Patel

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