Separation of topographic and intrinsic backscatter variations in biscopic radar images: A magic airbrush

Kirk, R. L.

Shaded-relief maps portraying landforms as they would appear in the absence of variations in the intrinsic brightness of the surface are a venerable and extremely useful tool in planetary geology. Such maps have traditionally been produced by a highly labor intensive manual process. Skilled cartographer-artists develop detailed mental images of landforms by meticulous scrutiny of all available data, and are able to use an airbrush and electric eraser to draw these images on a map. This process becomes increasingly time-consuming or even impossible if - as is true for radar data in general and Magellan data in particular - the effects on image brightness of varying scattering properties greatly outweigh those of slope variations. Because of the difficulty of interpreting relief in the Magellan images, the airbrush technique is being used only to remove obvious artifacts from low-resolution, shaded-relief images computed digitally from altimetric data. A surprisingly simple digital-processing technique that can be applied to pairs of radar images to produce shaded-relief-like results at the full image resolution is described. These shaded-relief images can be used not only as base maps, but to improve the accuracy of quantitative topographic mapping by radarclinometry and stereoanalysis.

Document ID

19940011845

Acquisition Source

Legacy CDMS

Document Type

Conference Paper

Authors

Date Acquired

September 6, 2013

Publication Date

January 1, 1993

Publication Information

Publication: Lunar and Planetary Inst., Twenty-Fourth Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. Part 2: G-M

Subject Category

Accession Number

94N16318

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Public

Work of the US Gov. Public Use Permitted.

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