NASA Crater Detection
Over $50,000 in prizes!
NASA Crater Detection
Over $50,000 in prizes!
Overview
Crater rims are vital landmarks for planetary science and navigation. Yet detecting them in real imagery is tough, with shadows, lighting shifts, and broken edges obscuring their shape.
This project invites you to develop methods that can reliably fit ellipses to crater rims, helping advance future space exploration.
Details
In the pursuit of next generation, terrain-based optical navigation, NASA is developing a system that will use a visible-light camera on a spacecraft to capture orbital images of lunar terrain and process the imagery to:
detect the crater rims in the images,
identify the craters from a catalog, and
estimate the camera/vehicle position based on the identified craters.
The focus of this project is the crater detection process.
Natural imagery varies significantly in lighting and will impact the completeness of crater rims in the images.
Topcoder will help NASA develop a software function that can read in such imagery and reliably detect ellipses along the edges of visible crater rims. Images will feature varying altitudes and viewing angles, crater densities, sizes, rim sharpness and completeness, lighting, shadowing, contrast conditions, and the presence of myriad non-crater features.
Challenge Phase
$20,000
$15,000
$10,000
$3,000
$2,000
$1,000
Challenge Phase
Resources
NASA Resources:
Lunar Database Paper
This might be interesting for academic background, but shouldn't be interpreted as indicative of our catalogHigh Performance Ellipse Fitting
"Hyper or Semi-Hyper Least Squares" methods used in this paper are recommended for ellipse fitting if contestants find it useful.(Not required.)
Topcoder Resources:
Leaderboard
| Place | Member | Country | Provisional Rank | Provisional Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 |  testaws1  Japan | Japan | 1 | - |