Lunar terrain reconstruction using PDEs

Based on the geometry features of lunar terrain, this paper treats lunar terrain reconstruction as a surface reconstruction problem. We define an energy functional model consisting of local energy term and smooth energy term for lunar terrain reconstruction. The solution to minimize the functional (by partial differential equations) is defined as the optimal surface. In the smooth energy term, we design a vector field of depth discontinuousness likelihood (VFDDL) to control the direction and degree of smoothing. Experiments indicate that accurate VFDDL can lead to an exact reconstructed surface. Thus, VFDDL transfers 3D terrain reconstruction into a 2D image processing problem. An innovative method is proposed to estimate VFDDL, using image local and statistical features. Experiments verify our method and show a good performance in terrain reconstruction.