Abstract
Abstract. Mars mapping is essential to the scientific research of the red planet. The special terrain characteristics of Martian surface can be used to develop the targeted image matching method. In this paper, in order to generate high resolution Mars DEM, a pixel-level image matching method for Mars orbital pushbroom images is proposed. The main strategies of our method include: (1) image matching on approximate orthophotos; (2) estimating approximate value of conjugate points by using ground point coordinates of orthophotos; (3) hierarchical image matching; (4) generating DEM and approximate orthophotos at each pyramid level; (5) fast transformation from ground points to image points for pushbroom images. The derived DEM at each pyramid level is used as reference data for the generation of approximate orthophotos at the next pyramid level. With iterative processing, the generated DEM becomes more and more accurate and a very small search window is precise enough for the determination of conjugate points. The images acquired by High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on European Mars Express were used to verify our method’s feasibility. Experiment results demonstrate that accurate DEM data can be derived with an acceptable time cost by pixel-level image matching.
Highlights
Mars exploration is the hot spot of deep space exploration
The software development for image matching and geometric rectification was carried out using Visual Studio 2013 and Qt 5.4.2 on Windows 7 platform
It is noteworthy that the forward intersection and Digital Elevation Model (DEM) interpolation with large-scale point clouds requires a lot of processing time as well
Summary
Mars exploration is the hot spot of deep space exploration. Both scientific research and practical engineering applications such as landing sites selection and rover navigation requires high resolution topographic data (Di, 2008). Mars global DEM is essential data for planetary science. The Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) DEM is widely used due to its global coverage and high absolute accuracy. The HRSC has been imaging the Martian surface since January 2000, and is still on operational up to now. After more than ten years on-orbit operation, the HRSC images have almost covered the entire Martian surface. The early released standard HRSC Level-4 data are single orbit products
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
