Automated reconstruction of subsurface interfaces in Promethei Lingula near the Martian south pole by using SHARAD data

Abstract

A B S T R A C TSubsurface layers are preserved in polar regions on Mars, which are considered to be a record of past climate changes on Mars. Orbital radar instruments like the SHAllow RADar (SHARAD) on board Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) transmit radar signals to Mars and receive a set of signals returned from interfaces having a contrast in dielectric properties in the probed subsurface regions. These subsurface layers which are preserved in the upper % 1 km of the Martian Polar Layered Deposits (PLDs) can be observed in SHARAD radargrams. Extraction of these layering features is the preliminary work before interpreting and understanding their origins. In this study, we use a new method based on log-Gabor filtering and Continuous Wavelet Transform (CWT)-based peak detection to extract subsurface radar reflections and a workflow to remove clutter reflections in order to reconstruct 3-D subsurface layers. These methods and workflow are then tested on the SHARAD data in the Promethei Lingula region near the Martian south pole. The results show that following this workflow, the ground surface and six subsurface interfaces can be reconstructed, which aids in the interpretation of the depositional and erosional history of this region.

Five decades of radioglaciology

“…Efforts to automate layer tracing continue, which include methodologies that use seed points to initiate semi-automatic tracing routines as well as fully automatic schemes. In parallel, the extra-terrestrial radar community has been working toward automatically extracting layer information from the Martian orbital radar sounders (Ferro and Bruzzone, 2012; Onana and others, 2015; Xiong and others, 2018; Xiong and Muller, 2019). Delf and others (2020) (this issue) present some strategies for assessing automated algorithms inherited from both terrestrial and planetary work.…”

Subsurface Reflectors Detected by SHARAD Reveal Stratigraphy and Buried Channels Over Central Elysium Planitia, Mars

“…Over the study area, 877 SHARAD radargrams in total were collected and manually digitized to generate depth maps of subsurface radar reflectors. To try to accelerate this process, we also tested an automated layer extraction method, SHARAD3d proposed by Xiong and Muller (2019). A comparison between the manual and automated delineation can be seen in the supporting information.…”

Automatic Extraction of Martian Subsurface Layer from Radargrams Based on PDE Denoising and KL Filter

“…Moreover, since the wavelet transform algorithm in [13] is based on wavelet transform peak detection, Table 3 presents the comparison results, indicating that compared to [13], the algorithm in this paper performs better in terms of the missed detection rate, but is slightly inferior in terms of the false detection rate. Although a lower missed detection rate is often accompanied by a higher false detection rate, this phenomenon may be due to the preprocessing step not completely removing the noise without stratification.…”

“…Ref. [13] combined the Continuous Wavelet Transform (CWT) and the DBSCAN clustering algorithm for three-dimensional reconstruction of subsurface reflectors in the Promethei-Lingula region. This technique is primarily suited for areas where reflectors are more dispersed.…”