Reconstruct Mars Automatically In Minutes

ScienceDaily (Sep. 17, 2009) — A computer system is under development that can automatically combine images of the Martian surface, captured by landers or rovers, in order to reproduce a three dimensional view of the red planet. The resulting model can be viewed from any angle, giving astronomers a realistic and immersive impression of the landscape.

"....The growing amount of available imagery from Mars is nearly impossible to handle for the manual image processing techniques used to date.

....From the technical point of view, the image processing consists of three stages: the first step is determining the image order. If the input images are unordered, i.e. they do not form a sequence but still are somehow connected, a state-of-the-art image indexing technique is able to find images of cameras observing the same part of the scene."

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