System and method of crater detection and registration using marked point processes, multiple birth and death methods and region-based analysis

A method of detecting craters on a planetary surface, the method comprising:

• capturing images of a planetary surface using a sensor, as input images;
• cropping said input images and reference images using a pre-processing module;
• reducing noise and extracting contours from said input images and said reference images using said pre-processing module;
• performing data reduction and transformation of image data from said preprocessing module using a crater extraction module, and performing energy minimization on said input images and said reference images using marked point processes, combined with both a multiple-birth-and-death and a multiple-birth-and-cut method;
• performing a first registration using said crater extraction module, by crater-to-contour registration and crater-to-crater registration,
• wherein said crater-to-contour registration includes matching the craters extracted from said reference images with edge contours extracted from said input images, and
• wherein crater-to-crater registration includes matching the craters extracted from both said reference images and said input images using a mean-directed Hausdorff distance;
• and
• performing a second registration using a mutual information-based image registration module, by maximizing mutual information between said reference images and said input images to achieve a final transformation and registered images.