Search

Generating accurate three dimensional planetary models is becoming increasingly important as NASA plans manned missions to return to the Moon in the next decade. This paper describes a 3D surface and albedo reconstruction from orbital imagery. The techniques described here allow us to automatically produce seamless, highly accurate digital elevation and albedo models from multiple stereo image pairs while significantly reducing the influence of image noise. Our technique is demonstrated on the entire set of orbital images retrieved by the Apollo 15 mission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]