Automated Lunar Crater Identification with Chandrayaan-2 TMC-2 Images using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Terrestrial planets and their moons have impact craters, contributing significantly to the complex geomorphology of planetary bodies in our Solar System. Traditional crater identification methods struggle with accuracy because of the diverse forms, locations, and sizes of the craters. Our main aim is to locate lunar craters using images from Terrain Mapping Camera-2 (TMC-2) onboard the Chandrayaan-II satellite. The crater-based U-Net model, a convolutional neural network frequently used in image segmentation tasks, is a deep learning method presented in this study. The task of crater detection was accomplished with the proposed model in two steps: initially, it was trained using Resnet18 as the backbone and U-Net based on Image Net as weights. Secondly, TMC-2 images from Chandrayaan-2 were used to detect craters based on the trained model. The model proposed in this study comprises a neural network, feature extractor, and optimization technique for lunar crater detection. The model achieves 80.95% accuracy using unannotated data and precision and recall are much better with annotated data with an accuracy of 86.91% in object detection with TMC-2 ortho images. 2000 images have been considered for the present work as manual annotation is a time-consuming process and the inclusion of more images can enhance the performance score of the model proposed.