Detecting and Refining HiRISE Image Patches Obscured by Atmospheric Dust

Abstract

HiRISE (High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) is a camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance orbiter responsible for photographing vast areas of the Martian surface in unprecedented detail. It can capture millions of incredible closeup images in minutes. However, Mars suffers from frequent regional and local dust storms hampering this data-collection process, and pipeline, resulting in loss of effort and crucial flight time. Removing these images manually requires a large amount of manpower. I filter out these images obstructed by atmospheric dust automatically by using a Dust Image Classifier fine-tuned on Resnet-50 with an accuracy of 94.05%. To further facilitate the seamless filtering of Images I design a prediction pipeline that classifies and stores these dusty patches. I also denoise partially obstructed images using an Auto Encoder-based denoiser and Pix2Pix GAN with 0.75 and 0.99 SSIM Index respectively.