An improved method for terrain mapping from descent images

Abstract

In the exploration of the planets of our solar system, images taken during a lander's descent to the surface of a planet provide a critical link for surface reconstruction. In use of descent images taken by landing camera is an effective way for terrain mapping. The method by dividing virtual planes for reconstruction has been improved in our paper. Based on plane homograph relationship, the match-related value noise is eliminated by gauss filter, and discontinuity disparity areas are smoothed by introduction of smooth-constraint match cost function. We demonstrate experimental results on synthetic images and our method can achieve better accuracy and effectiveness for terrain mapping. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.