High-quality mapping products for Martian craters are helpful data sources for scientists to explore the red planet in many fields. This thesis focuses on integrating orbital imagery and ground imagery to generate high-quality Martian crater mapping products. The usability of the proposed method is validated mainly at one crater – Santa Maria Crater. The orbital imagery comes from the High Resolution Instrument Scientific Experiment (HiRISE) camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) satellite. The ground imagery comes from the Navigation cameras (Navcams) and Panoramic cameras (Pancams) images taken by the Opportunity rover in Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission.
In this thesis, important processes during the mapping will be introduced, discussed, and analyzed, including interest point extraction, image network construction, bundle adjustment (BA), dense matching, and product generation. Some new methods during these processes are proposed to improve the quality of the final products. The wide-baseline method is used in an unprecedented way in the tie point selection to guarantee the accuracy of the distant tie points. An integrated bundle adjustment replaces the former incremental bundle adjustment used in the MER mission for large crater mapping. Matching in the featureless areas is also discussed in this paper. The theoretical analysis and the improved results of these proposed methods are highlighted with details.
The mapping products at Santa Maria Crater are listed to illustrate the feasibility of the proposed mapping methods. A reasonable conclusion is that the methods mentioned in this thesis work smoothly at Santa Maria Crater.