AUTOMATED DETECTION OF LUNAR RIDGES BASED ON DEM DATA

Abstract. Wrinkle ridges are a common feature in the lunar maria and record subsequent contraction of mare infill. Automatic detection of wrinkle ridges is challenging because the ridges are of irregular shapes and many ridges have been eroded and/or degraded over time. The proposed method consists of the following steps. First, as the slope can reflect the gradient changes of the ridge rims to a certain extent, the slope map is generated and converted to a grayscale (0–255) image. Then the phase symmetry of the slope map is calculated with filter wavelength and filter scales parameters, which reduce the regions into symmetry regions. Next, a regional threshold is applied to limit the ridge candidates. Candidates with values less than the threshold are rejected. Moreover, the images are processed using a series of morphological operations, such as close, open, edge linking and noise removal. Finally, after thresholding the ridge map can be obtained. An experiment was performed using Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) WAC image and topographic data from LOLA, the results demonstrate promising performance with detection percentage from 73 to 90.