AUTOMATIC REGISTRATION, INTEGRATION AND ENHANCEMENT OF INDIA'S CHANDRAYAAN-1 IMAGES WITH NASA'S LRO MAPS

Vivek Kumar, Himanshu S. Mazumdar

Abstract: Chandrayaan-1 was Indias first mission in deep space exploration to the moon. Its Terrain Mapping Camera (TMC) sent images of about 50% of total lunar surface in its limited lifetime and covered polar areas almost completely at a high resolution of 5m/pixel and 10m/pixel. This image dataset has been processed and put in public domain as individual strips of images categorized according to the orbits. The authors have already developed a Lunar GIS including a set of utilities like 3-D vision and exploration, crater detection and search using datasets from NASAs Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Wide Angle Camera (WAC) which are of lower resolution than CH1. The objective of this paper is to normalize and register the Chandrayaan-1 images to existing processed data so that all these utilities can be transparently applied to high resolution Chandrayaan-1 datasets. Registration process consists of identification of features in source and target images and estimating appropriate correction for offset, rotation and scaling parameters. Furthermore, due to the low altitude orbit of satellite, the acquired images have displacement of pixels from actual nadir position, which need non-linear correction. This paper describes step by step technique to integrate these high and low resolution images in single framework.

Keywords: Chandrayaan-1Lunar mapping, Moon, Feature based Image registration, Integration, ISRO, LRO, NASA, TMC, WAC.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15623/ijret.2015.0403102