Coarse-to-Fine Extraction of Small-Scale Lunar Impact Craters From the CCD Images of the Chang’E Lunar Orbiters

摘要

Lunar impact craters form the basis for lunar geological stratigraphy, and small-scale craters further enrich the basic statistical data for the estimation of local geological ages. Thus, the extraction of lunar impact craters is an important branch of modern planetary studies. However, few studies have reported on the extraction of small-scale craters. Therefore, this paper proposes a coarse-to-fine resolution method to automatically extract small-scale impact craters from charge-coupled device (CCD) images using histogram of oriented gradient (HOG) features and a support vector machine (SVM) classifier. First, large-scale craters are extracted as samples from the Chang’E-1 images with spatial resolutions of 120 m. The SVM classifier is then employed to establish the criteria for classifying craters and noncraters from the HOG features of the extracted samples. The criteria are then used to extract small-scale craters from higher resolution Chang’E-2 CCD images with spatial resolutions of 1.4, 7, and 50 m. The sample database is updated with the newly extracted small-scale craters for the purpose of the progressive optimization of the extraction. The proposed method is tested on both simulated images and multiple resolutions of real CCD images acquired by the Chang’E orbiters and provides high accuracy results in the extraction of the small-scale impact craters, the smallest of which is 20 m.