Enhancing mastcam images for mars rover mission

Abstract

This paper summarizes some new results in improving the left Mastcam images of the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) onboard the Mars rover Curiosity. There are two multispectral Mastcam imagers, having 9 bands in each. The left imager has wide field of view, but low resolution whereas the right imager is just the opposite. Our goal is to investigate the possibility of fusing the left and right images to form high spatial resolution and high spectral resolution data cube so that stereo images and data clustering performance can be improved. Many pansharpening algorithms have been investigated. Actual Mastcam images were used in our experiments. Preliminary results indicate that the pansharpened images can indeed enhance the data clustering performance using both objective and subjective evaluations.