Dealing With Overlap

We’re now working on dealing with the last major component of the Planet Four data processing pipeline, the overlap regions of neighboring subject images. We divide each HiRISE images into many smaller 840×648 pixel subimages or subjects that we show on Planet Four. To make sure we capture fans and blotches that are the edges of our subject images, we have a 100 pixel overlap between the neighboring left and bottom subject images. This means that we have duplicate markings that cover the same source which we need to identify as being the same source to allow for counting the number of seasonal sources and to also accurately measure the shape of very large fans or blotches.

We spent part of the last science call looking at some examples of overlap regions and the outputting fan and blotch shapes after clustering to decide what to do.

Image credit: K-M. Aye

If you focus on the center sources in the two plots above, you see there are lots of markings identifying the same shape from the different subject images that contained varying parts of the central  blotch or fan. Based on what we see, we think we if in the overlap region we only keep the largest source and anything that extends beyond that we will accurate identify the fan or blotch being marked. We’re going to test that this week and review the output from the catalog for a small portion of the overlap regions to confirm.

Once we sort what to do in the overlap regions, the focus should be writing all of the steps in the processing pipeline into the paper draft.