An Automated Method for Crater Counting Using Rotational Pixel Swapping Method

摘要

We develop a fully automated algorithm for determining the geological ages by crater counting from the digital terrain model (DTM) and the digital elevation model (DEM) taken by remote-sensing observations. The algorithm is based on the rotational pixel swapping method, which uses a multiplication operation between the original DTM/DEM data and the rotated data to detect impact craters. Our method does not need binarization and/or noise reduction, because noise components are automatically erased. We show that our method can detect not only simple craters but also complex circular structures such as imperfect, degraded, or overlapping craters. We demonstrate that this method succeeds in the automatic detection of hundreds to thousands of impact craters, and the estimated ages are consistent with those by manual counting in previous works. In addition, it is shown that the calculation time by this method is more than several hundred times faster than by previous methods.