arXiv Computer Vision

Adapting a Foundation Model for Lunar Surface Height Estimation

The paper proposes a method to adapt the Depth Anything V2 (DAV2) zero‑shot relative depth model for estimating lunar surface height. By fine‑tuning DAV2 with publicly available stereophotogrammetry‑derived DEM data, the authors achieve a significant performance boost over the unadapted zero‑shot model. This improved estimator can provide more accurate relative height information useful for hazard detection in future ESA lunar landings.

arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 7

MoonGS: High-quality Representation of the Lunar Surface via Gaussian Splatting Using Robust Depth Features from Image Pairs

arXiv:2610.07110v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-quality 3D reconstruction of lunar terrain from sparse rover images is indispensable for autonomous lunar exploration, but remains challenging bec...

By Yun Jiang, Bo Zheng, Yingying Zhang, Xueming Xiao, Tao Hu, Hutao Cui, Zhiguo Meng, Ke Gao, Yang Gao, Meibao Yao
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 3

Vision-Language Model for Accurate Crater Detection

The paper presents a deep‑learning crater detection algorithm (CDA) based on the OWLv2 Vision Transformer, fine‑tuned with Low‑Rank Adaptation on a manually labeled IMPACT dataset. It optimizes a combined loss of CIoU for localization and contrastive loss for classification, achieving a maximum recall of 92.6% and precision of 71.4% on lunar images. The method demonstrates reliable crater detection under varied illumination and rugged terrain, supporting safer lunar landings.

By Patrick Bauer, Marius Schwinning, Florian Renk, Andreas Weinmann, Hichem Snoussi
arXiv AI
Sep 15

Multimodal-Multiresolution Foundation Model for Lunar Remote Sensing

The paper introduces a multimodal foundation model for lunar remote sensing, trained from scratch on SomBench—a dataset of nearly two million co‑registered tile bundles across 11 modalities at 1 m and 100 m resolutions. The model extends the TerraMind masked‑token architecture with lunar‑specific features such as explicit acquisition geometry and joint training of two spatial scales, and employs FlexiViT patch embeddings for adaptable patch sizes. Evaluation on crater detection, irregular mare patch segmentation, and polar ice prospectivity regression shows that the pretrained model matches or surpasses ImageNet‑pretrained baselines, with notable label efficiency and effective adaptation via LoRA.

By Paolo Fraccaro, Gabby Nyirjesy, Daniela Szwarcman, Himanshu Patil, Vishal Gaur, Rohit Lal, Rachel A. Slank, Geoffrey Dawson, Hiyam Debary, Michael K. Barker, Andrew Annex, Vishnu Viswanathan, Zachary Morse, Ethan I. Schaefer, Nikolaos Dionelis, Ankur Kumar, Campbell D. Watson, Manil Maskey, Rebekah I. Dawson-Rigas, Juan Bernab\'e-Moreno, Rahul Ramachandran, Sujit Roy
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 15

SomBench: Benchmark Dataset for Advancing Machine Learning in Lunar Science

arXiv:2609.13277v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Lunar orbital missions, such as Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, Kaguya/SELENE, Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory, and Lunar Prospector, among ot...

By Himanshu Patil, Gabby Nyirjesy, Rachel A. Slank, Vishal Gaur, Daniela Szwarcman, Paolo Fraccaro, Nikolaos Dionelis, Michael K. Barker, Andrew Annex, Vishnu Viswanathan, Zachary Morse, Ethan I. Schaefer, Hiyam Debary, Ankur Kumar, Rohit Lal, Geoffrey Dawson, Campbell Watson, Rebekah I. Dawson-Rigas, Manil Maskey, Juan Bernab\'e-Moreno, Rahul Ramachandran, Sujit Roy
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 9

Globally Localizing Lunar Rover in Pixels via Graph Alignment

Precise rover localization is a prerequisite for autonomous lunar exploration, yet the absence of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals and the cumulative drift of local localization methods severely constrain long-range missions. Cross-view localization provides a promising drift-free global solution by matching rover-view and satellite-view imagery.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 2

Geometric Foundation Model Distillation for Efficient Lunar 3D Reconstruction

Large 3D foundation models such as MASt3R achieve state-of-the-art stereo reconstruction but are computationally demanding for deployment under strict hardware constraints -- a critical limitation in domains such as planetary exploration, where onboard computing is severely restricted. We study how far such models can be compressed through knowledge distillation, using lunar stereo reconstruction as a challenging and practically relevant case study.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

Marigold V2: Revisiting Diffusion Transformers for Monocular Depth Estimation

arXiv:2609.08084v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Monocular depth estimation is a ubiquitous yet highly ill-posed computer vision task, with downstream applications in scene reconstruction, computati...

By Igor Pavlovic, Thiemo Wandel, Anton Obukhov, Luca Bartolomei, Andrey Davydov, Fabio Tosi, Matteo Poggi, Sabine S\"usstrunk, Dengxin Dai
arXiv Computer Vision
5d ago

Evaluation of Front-End Feature Matching for Lunar Visual SLAM

The study evaluates eleven feature detector–matcher combinations for lunar visual SLAM using synthetic, lunar-testbed, and terrestrial-analogue datasets. SuperPoint pairings outperform SIFT with ratio-tested FLANN in a rotation-only metric on lunar testbeds, but SIFT excels when rotation and translation are jointly scored on synthetic data. In stereo VO, SuperPoint maintains tracking across all datasets, while classical detectors are more sensitive to lighting conditions, and the fastest learned combination is SuperPoint with LightGlue.

By Guillem Casadesus Vila, Grace Gao