A simulation framework to assess pattern matching algorithms in a space mission

Within the framework of the European Space Agency (ESA), the BepiColombo space mission will target Mercury as the planet to be studied to discover more about the formation and the composition of the inner planets of our solar system. Mercury exhibits an effect (the libration) whose amplitude could determine whether the core is liquid. The method we propose to estimate the libration amplitude is based on matching of surface features extracted from image pairs taken at different epochs and thereby affected by illumination and scale artifacts. Since no detailed image pairs are available to assess the accuracy of the methods we propose, in order to generate synthetic images of the planet’s surface we have developed the simulation framework we present in this work. Finally, we discuss some preliminary matching results on surface features extracted from our synthetic images taken at different altitude and affected by illumination changes.