Craters detection on lunar

This project focuses on identification of craters in terms of its characteristics and detection of these visual features of the moon to determine a safe landing site for a lunar Lander. Cheng et al. proposed using craters as landmarks for navigation purposes because this geometric model grants a robust detection under different lighting conditions. Moreover, craters appear in enough density on most planetary system bodies of interest and also known as a fairly stable in appearance or shapes over time or under different conditions and environments. These special features make them an appropriate type of landmark to observe. Currently, there are a lot of ongoing researches mainly on craters detection and optical navigation systems for the moon but still using a complex and similar approach such as detection using the Hough transform method. To part from this limitation, the author decides to build a simple algorithm for detecting craters on a moon surface which will detect the craters based on two important measurements that are the distance and angle measurements. The advantages of using this approach are (1) its uncomplicatedness (2) fast detection (3) can be used further in ellipse reconstruction algorithm to determine the position and orientation of the crater. This paper will discuss the method of employing MATLAB and image processing tool on an optical image as well as the morphological image detection fundamentals. In addition, some geometrical projection analysis in reconstructing an ellipse as a disc will be evaluated in order to obtain the orientation of the disc (crater) for autonomous optical navigation system.