Automated localisation of Mars rovers using co-registered HiRISE-CTX-HRSC orthorectified images and wide baseline Navcam orthorectified mosaics

• Published in: Icarus (New York, N.Y. 1962) N.Y. 1962), 2016-12, Vol.280, p.139-157
• Main Authors: Tao, Yu, Muller, Jan-Peter, Poole, William
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Assessments; Automation; Co-registration; Data fusion; Data integration; Image reconstruction; Localization; Mars; Mars missions; Mars rovers; Multi-resolution; Optical localisation; Rover; Surface
• ISSN: 0019-1035; 1090-2643
• DOI: 10.1016/j.icarus.2016.06.017

•New techniques and applications of automated optical co-registration based rover localisation methods with examples from MER-A, MER-B, and MSL.•We retrieve rover locations through co-registration from orbital to ground co-ordinates to bring everything into the same unique and common geo-referenced coordinate system with respect to HRSC and MOLA.•The multi-sensor co-registration based method guarantees a global compliance that does not have accumulated error in network based localisation approaches.•The results are a set of co-registered ORI/DTMs from HiRISE, CTX, and HRSC and updated rover locations for the full traverses of the three rover missions.•The products can be interactively explored and analysed using our 3D viewer and web-GIS system introduced in this paper. We present a wide range of research results in the area of orbit-to-orbit and orbit-to-ground data fusion, achieved within the EU-FP7 PRoVisG project and EU-FP7 PRoViDE project. We focus on examples from three Mars rover missions, i.e. MER-A/B and MSL, to provide examples of a new fully automated offline method for rover localisation. We start by introducing the mis-registration discovered between the current HRSC and HiRISE datasets. Then we introduce the HRSC to CTX and CTX to HiRISE co-registration workflow. Finally, we demonstrate results of wide baseline stereo reconstruction with fixed mast position rover stereo imagery and its application to ground-to-orbit co-registration with HiRISE orthorectified image. We show examples of the quantitative assessment of recomputed rover traverses, and extensional exploitation of the co-registered datasets in visualisation and within an interactive web-GIS.