Automatic Mars rover detection from multi-temporal HiRISE imagery

In this paper, we present a Phase Correlation (PC) based change detection algorithm which is able to automatically detect very small target such as the Mars rover in multi-temporal HiRISE images under illumination variation and camera motion. The robustness of PC to illumination variation was proved by our previous work while the geometric distortion caused by camera motion can be eliminated by PC-based pixel-wise image co-registration. Experiments using three HiRISE images taken under different illumination and view angle demonstrate that our algorithm can robustly detect the Mars rover as small as 6×9 pixels in conditions of varying illumination and camera 3D status.