Automatic extraction of ellipsoidal features for planetary image registration

Giulia Troglio*, Jacqueline Le Moigne, Jn Atli Benediktsson, Gabriele Moser, Sebastiano B. Serpico

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

36 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

With the launch of several planetary missions in the last decade, a large amount of planetary images has been already acquired and much more will be available for analysis in the coming years. The image data need to be analyzed, preferably by automatic processing techniques because of the huge amount of data. Although many automatic feature extraction methods have been proposed and utilized for earth remote sensing images, these methods are not always applicable to planetary data that often present low contrast and uneven illumination characteristics. Here, we propose a new unsupervised method for the extraction of different features of elliptical and geometrically compact shapes, such as craters and rocks of compact shape (e.g., boulders), to be used for image registration purposes. This approach is based on the combination of several image processing techniques, including watershed segmentation and the generalized Hough transform. The method potentially has application for extraction of craters, rocks, and other geological features.

Original languageEnglish
Article number6006510
Pages (from-to)95-99
Number of pages5
JournalIEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters
Volume9
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2012

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
Manuscript received September 25, 2010; revised February 15, 2011 and June 21, 2011; accepted June 27, 2011. Date of publication August 30, 2011; date of current version December 23, 2011. This work was supported in part by the Research of Fund of the University of Iceland and started during G. Troglio’s research visit to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA.

Other keywords

  • Crater detection
  • feature extraction
  • Hough transform
  • watershed segmentation

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Automatic extraction of ellipsoidal features for planetary image registration'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this