Martian ionogram scaling by the Object Tracking Method

Abstract

The Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding (MARSIS) onboard the Mars Express (MEX) spacecraft started to collect data of the Martian topside ionosphere from May, 2005. By now a large amount of ionograms has been obtained. It is important to extract vertical ionospheric information effectively from the ionograms for further study. In this paper a new method, Object Tracking Method (OTM), is proposed to automatically extract the ionospheric electron density profiles by computer. This method is based on three algorithms, namely the Hough transform, region growing segmentation algorithm and moving objects detection method from video sequences. In processing ionosphere echoes are treated as moving objects. The identification ratio of OTM for the MARSIS ionograms is estimated to be around 90%.