Title: Automatic Detection of Sub-Kilometers Craters in High Resolution Planetary Images

Speaker: Wei Ding, Assistant Professor Computer Science Department University of Massachusetts Boston

Time: 2010-7-12, 15:30-16:30

Venue: FIT 1-515

Abstract:

Identifying impact craters on planetary surfaces is one fundamental task in planetary science. In this talk, we present an embedded computing Framework on auto-detection of craters, using feature selection and boosting strategies. The paradigm aims at building a universal and practical crater detector. This methodology addresses three issues that such a tool must possess：(i)it utilizes mathematical morphology to efficiently identify the regions of an image that can potentially contain craters; only those regions，defined as crater candidates，are the subiects of further processing; (ii)it selects Haar-like image texture features in combination with boosting ensemble supervised learning algorithms to accurately classify candidates into craters and non-craters; (iii)it uses transfer learning, at a minimum additional cost, to enable maintaining an accurate auto-detection of craters on new images, having morphology different from what has been captured by theoriginal training set. All three aforementioned components of the detection methodology are discussed，and the entire framework is evaluated on a large test image of 37，500 by 56，250 m2 on Mars，showing heavily cratered Martian terrain characterized by non-uniform surface morphology. Our study demonstrates that this methodology provides a robust and practical tool for planetary science，in terms of both detection accuracy and efficiency.

Speaker Bio:

Wei Ding has been an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Boston since 2008. She received her Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Houston in 2008. Her main research interests include Data Mining，Machine Learning，Artificial Intelligence，Computational Semantics，and with applications to astronomy，geosciences，and environmental sciences. She has published 31 referred research papers and has 1 patent. She is the recipient of a Best Poster Presentation award at ACM SIGSPAITAL GIS 2008 and the Best PhD Work Award between 2007 and 2010 from the University of Houston. Her research projects are currently sponsored by NASA and NSF.