Image Co-registration
When combining orbital images of Mars taken at different times, precise alignment — co-registration — is essential. Small misalignments between images propagate into every downstream product: mosaics, digital terrain models, and change detection maps all suffer.
Traditional co-registration workflows for CTX (Context Camera) images from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter rely on manual tie-point generation — a tedious, time-consuming process that doesn’t scale. This project develops an automatic co-registration pipeline using modern image processing techniques that eliminates the need for manual tie-points entirely, producing well-aligned image stacks ready for downstream analysis.
This is a collaborative project with Sebastian Walter as the lead at Freie Universität Berlin, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) through DLR (grant 50 OO 2204).
Outputs
- EGU 2023 poster
- LPSC 54 (2023) abstract
- Walter et al. (2024), “Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Context Camera Updated In-Flight Calibration,” Earth and Space Science 11(2). DOI: 10.1029/2023EA003491