Automatic slope streak detection on Mars

Abstract

An algorithm to detect slope streaks on Mars is presented in this paper. It is mainly based on morphological operators and consists of three steps: 'pre-processing' with connected operators to filter small structures and shadows, 'detection' with top-hat, Otsu binarisation and thinning/pruning-reconstruction operations and by a 'post-processing' to remove non-elongated objects. The algorithm is successfully tested on very high resolution images (0.25-6.5 m/pixel) of HiRISE and MOC cameras on different locations of Mars.