Mars Image Collection Mosaic Builder

A computer program assembles images from the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Mars Observer Camera Narrow Angle (MOCNA) collection to generate a uniform-high-resolution, georeferenced, uncontrolled mosaic image of the Martian surface. At the time of reporting the information for this article, the mosaic covered 7 percent of the Martian surface and contained data from more than 50,000 source images acquired under various light conditions at various resolutions.

The program geolocates, reprojects, and blends one source image at a time onto the mosaic. Geolocation and reprojection involve the use of a second-order polynomial based on coordinates of the source-image footprints. Images are stacked in the order of increasing resolution — higher-resolution images on top of lower-resolution images. The stacking order is also partly determined by the order of adding the source images to the mosaic. The mosaic-image data are stored in a custom file format that accommodates regional tiles and supports explicit representation of empty areas, image-data compression, and representation of localized changes.

The program is written as a script in the ImageTCL software of Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI), using SGI Image Vision Library with extensions specific to a geographic information system.

This program was written by Lucian Plesea of Caltech and Trent Hare of the United States Geological Survey for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

This software is available for commercial licensing. Please contact Karina Edmonds of the California Institute of Technology at (626) 395-2322. Refer to NPO-45960.