Crater detection in multi-ring basins of mercury

Abstract

This paper presents the automated detection of impact craters on large regions of Mercury. The processing sequence is composed by three main phases: the first consists on creating the image mosaics of the large areas of interest, the second by finding crater candidates on these mosaics, and finally by extracting a set of features that are used in the classification by SVM-Support Vector Machine in the third phase. The detections are performed on images acquired by the MDIS-NAC camera of MESSENGER probe covering three large basins on Mercury (Rachmaninoff, Mozart and Raditladi).