Method of Passive Image Based Crater Autonomous Detection

Impact craters are commonly found on the surface of planets, satellites, asteroids, and other solar system bodies. The application field of crater detection algorithm ranges from estimation of planetary surface age to autonomous landing on planets and advanced statistical analyses. this article introduced a method of passive image based crater autonomous detection. Candidate area, is defined as a small rectangular region including craters. The criterion to select a candidate area is there being one or a few craters in it. Then after a brief discussion of pre-processing of crater candidate area to obtain edge information of craters, comes a description of the theory of chord midpoint Hough transform and the process of crater detection. The article analyzes the reason behind the production of false center points of circularity as well. Experiment evidences the viability of discovering relatively large craters with clear edges.