YOLOLens2.0: A Unified Super-Resolution and Detection Framework for High-Fidelity Crater Mapping in Lunar Permanently Shadowed Regions

Abstract. Accurate crater mapping in lunar permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) is hindered by extreme low-light and low-resolution imagery. We present YOLOLens2.0, a unified, end-to-end deep learning framework designed for high-fidelity crater detection and terrain reconstruction in these challenging environments. The architecture integrates a Dense-Residual-Connected Transformer (DRCT) for multimodal super-resolution (SR) with a YOLO-derived detection module and an affine calibrator to ensure geometric consistency at meter scale. Our framework exploits a bidirectional synergy where SR enhances feature discriminability for detection, while detection-driven supervision refines structural reconstruction. Validation on Kaguya data demonstrates a significant performance leap, achieving a Recall of 89.20% and an mAP@50 of 0.844 an improvement of over 33 percentage points in recall compared to the original YOLOLens. Out-of-distribution validation on ShadowCam imagery, performed without fine-tuning, confirms the model’s robustness and scalability. The framework successfully preserves quantitative elevation fidelity and supports detailed morphometric analyses, including the extraction of the crater size-frequency distributions (SFDs) that align with theoretical lunar production functions. YOLOLens2.0 provides a scalable, high-precision methodology for planetary mapping, offering critical insights for lunar surface evolution studies and future exploration missions.