Automatic Extraction of Planetary Image Features

With the launch of several Lunar missions such as the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and Chandrayaan-1, a large amount of Lunar images will be acquired and will need to be analyzed. Although many automatic feature extraction methods have been proposed and utilized for Earth remote sensing images, these methods are not always applicable to Lunar data that often present low contrast and uneven illumination characteristics. In this paper, we propose a new method for the extraction of features from the Lunar surface, based on the combination of several image processing techniques, including a watershed segmentation and the generalized Hough Transform. The method has many applications, among which image registration, and can be generalized to other planetary images as well.