Image-Based Lunar Surface Reconstruction Stephan Wenger, Anita Sellent, Ole Sch¨ utt, and Marcus Magnor Computer Graphics Lab, TU Braunschweig, M¨ uhlenpfordtstraße 23, D-38106 Braunschweig, Germany Abstract. For the creation of a realistic 3 meter-sized relief globe of the Moon, a detailed height map of the entire lunar surface is required. Available height measurements of the Moon’s surface are too coarse by a factor of 15 for this purpose. The only publicly available source of high-resolution information are photographic images from the Lu- nar Orbiter IV mission in 1967. We present a shape-from-shading ap- proach to plausibly increase the resolution of existing low-resolution height data, based on a single high-resolution photographic mosaic image of the Moon. The presented reconstruction approach is designed to be ro- bust with respect to frequent imperfections of the photographic imagery. Aside from the automatic reconstruction of a complete detailed lunar surface height map, we give a qualitative validation by the reconstruc- tion of lunar surface details from close-up photographs of the Apollo 15 landing site. 1 Introduction In July 1969, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin were the first men to land on the Moon during the Apollo 11 mission. Forty years and another five manned Moon landings later, much of the Moon’s surface structure still remains unrevealed. While many international space missions have been carried out since then [1], the most detailed photographs covering much of the lunar surface are still the ones taken by the Lunar Orbiter space probes (1966–1967). The available topographic data surprisingly is a lot more sparse for the Moon than, e.g., for the planet Mars. Our research project was initiated by the constructors of a Moon museum who noticed that the available lunar surface height data was utterly insufficient for the creation of one of the planned exhibits: a 3 meter-sized globe of the Moon with a realistic surface relief. For convincing effect, the necessary resolution of the lunar model height map would have to be about 3 pixels per millimeter on the model, or about 30 000 pixels around the model’s equator. For comparison, the resolution of the best existing height data from the Unified Lunar Control Network 2005 [3], Fig. 3, is on average a factor of 15 lower. While the Lunar Orbiter data seems to be the best available source for high- resolution photographs of the entire lunar surface, displaying most parts of the Moon with a resolution of 60 meters per pixel or better, this imagery is chal- lenging to interpret by a computer. The conventional photographic emulsion film was developed aboard the spacecraft, then digitized in stripes and transmitted brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by CiteSeerX