Crater Detection and Registration of Planetary Images Through Marked Point Processes, Multiscale Decomposition, and Region-Based Analysis

Because of the large variety of planetary sensors and spacecraft already collecting data and with many new and improved sensors being planned for future missions, planetary science needs to integrate numerous multimodal image sources, and, as a consequence, accurate and robust registration algorithms are required. In this article, we develop a new framework for crater detection based on marked point processes (MPPs) that can be used for planetary image registration. MPPs were found to be effective for various object detection tasks in Earth observation, and a new MPP model is proposed here for detecting craters in planetary data. 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—one based on birth–death processes and region-of-interest analysis and the other based on graph cuts and decimated wavelets—are developed within the proposed framework. Experiments with a large set of images, including 13 thermal infrared and visible images of the Mars surface, 20 semisimulated multitemporal pairs of images of the Mars surface, and a real multitemporal image pair of the Lunar surface, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework in terms of crater detection performance as well as for subpixel registration accuracy.