Global Identification of Lunar Dark Mantle Deposits

Lunar dark mantle deposits (DMDs), formed by explosive volcanic activity on the Moon, are typically composed of glass- and iron-rich pyroclastic materials, with slight variations in color, crystallinity, and TiO₂ concentration by region. This paper proposes a method for identifying DMDs using the YOLOv8 deep learning model, enhanced by the introduction of a multi-scale feature extraction (MSFE) module with an attention mechanism, which improves the model's ability to detect targets at different scales. First, a DMD dataset was constructed using Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) data, with manual annotations of DMD regions and lunar image slicing to optimize computational efficiency. The YOLOv8 architecture, with the incorporated MSFE module, was then used to improve model accuracy in complex terrain. The experimental results showed that the improved DM-YOLO model achieved a precision (P) of 83.9%, a recall (R) of 83.2%, and a mean average precision (mAP@0.5) of 84.2%, representing increases of 15.2%, 14.4%, and 14.0%, respectively, over those obtained with the original YOLOv8 model. The predicted results were preliminarily verified using FeO abundance data and further confirmed by analysis of M³ spectral absorption features, showing strong consistency with known DMDs in terms of both chemical composition and mineralogical characteristics. Observations showed that DMDs were located primarily in the low- and mid-latitude regions of the Moon, with most deposits found in the lunar highlands. The findings suggest that the DM-YOLO model has significant potential for providing technical support for lunar exploration and resource development, particularly for identifying small-scale features that are difficult to annotate.