Delineation of impact craters by a mathematical morphology based approach

Abstract

In this paper we propose a new algorithm to delineate the contours of impact craters. It is based on mahematical morphology operators and consists of two main phases: (i) filtering by connected operators and (ii) watershed based segmentation to draw the final contour. The image dataset used for testing is constituted by craters depicted from very high resolution imagery from the surface of Mars (HiRISE camera with a resolution of 25cm/pixel). The high performance (errors of about 4% and 10% for preserved and modified craters) and the hability of always estimating a contour for each crater are the main issues. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.