Terrain shape recognition for celestial landing/rover missions from shade information

This paper proposes a direct geographic recognition scheme from a gray-scal e image without shape reconstruction. Several geographic categories are exp ressed in 3x3-arrays of normal-vector directions. Only by looking up stable , observed pixel-values (intensities) in a window are transformed into inde ces of conformity whether the scene in the window is due to each geographic category or not. The recognition is accomplished by multi-resolution inter pretation and fuzzy-logical operations. The results of recognition-has show n the feasibility and robustness of the proposed method. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.