Topography Analysis of the Von Kármán Crater Based on the Observed Images

The Von Kármán crater, located in the South Pole-Aitken basin on the lunar far-side, is initially selected as the landing area for the Chang’e-4 mission, and its topography analysis is an important part of the mission design. In this paper, a Markov random field model（MRF）is employed to analyze the elevation data of the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter（LOLA）and the image data of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera（LROC）, which is developed to capture the topography of Von Kármán crater from the perspective of clustering. The likelihood function of the MRF model is used to describe the observed data with approximate normal distribution, and the label random field is designed to model the spatial relationship between data, and the probability inference is finally employed to obtain the clustering result. Experimental results show that clustering can effectively illustrate the topography at some low-contrast regions, and they can also assist the overall and local topography analysis by setting different clustering numbers.