Learning the Link between Albedo and Reflectance: Machine Learning-Based Prediction of Hyperspectral Bands from CTX Images

Abstract

The instruments of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) provide a large quantity and variety of imagining data for investigations of the Martian surface. Among others, the hyper-spectral Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) captures visible to infrared reflectance across several hundred spectral bands. However, Mars is only partially covered with targeted CRISM at full spectral and spatial resolution. In fact, less than one percent of the Martian surface is imaged in this way. In contrast, the Context Camera (CTX) onboard the MRO delivers images with a higher spatial resolution and the image data cover almost the entire Martian surface. In this work, we examine to what extent machine learning systems can learn the relation between morphology, albedo and spectral composition. To this end, a dataset of 67 CRISM-CTX image pairs is created and different deep neural networks are trained for the pixel-wise prediction of CRISM bands solely based on the albedo information of a CTX image. The trained models enable us to estimate spectral bands across large areas without existing CRISM data and to predict the spectral composition of any CTX image. The predictions are qualitatively similar to the ground-truth spectra and are also able to recover finer grained details, such as dunes or small craters.