Enceladus PDS image products Options

[Bjorn Jonsson]

Following discussions in the Image Processing Techniques subforum (see in particular this thread but also this one) I have now managed to create DEMs of acceptable quality of Enceladus using shape from shading and extensive post processing (mainly destriping). I now have a DEM mosaicked together from 5 images obtained during Cassini's first flyby of Enceladus in 2005. This will eventually become a global 23040x11520 pixel DEM but finishing it is going to be a lot of work (I will probably be using 50-100 images or more). Not all of Enceladus has been imaged at this resolution but there are many high resolution patches and I want a DEM big enough for these.

This 5 image DEM was big enough for me to really want to see what an Enceladus DEM animation would look like. So here we go:

 enceladus_sfs_umsf.avi ( 7.74MB ) Number of downloads: 1331


The field of view is 50 degrees. Most of the animation is at an altitude of 25-30 km. This is similar to Cassini's altitide during the closest flybys and the speed is not far from Cassini's speed either. However, the animation starts and ends at higher altitudes and we also swoop down to an altitude of ~10 km where the resolution of the DEM is highest.

This is the Cassini image I used for the highest resolution part of the DEM:



And a single frame from the animation showing a part of this terrain:



The DEM should be fairly accurate - in particular the animation should give a very good general idea of what Enceladus looks like even though some details are inaccurate. Also a higher resolution DEM is really needed for these low altitudes - the surface should look less smooth than it does here. Most of the striping is real though as there are lots of parallel ridges and grooves on Enceladus. There may be some spurious stripes but these are very subtle - the obvious ones are real.

I'll do a new animation once I have a significantly bigger DEM. It will probably have better optimized illumination. Shadows are really needed in the first half of this one because I optimized the illumination for the highest resolution part of the DEM. We fly over that part of the DEM at roughly 00:30.

EDIT: To play the animation you need to have an H.264 codec installed (if you are using Windows you can find one here for example).

[Bjorn Jonsson]

My latest animation:

Flight over Enceladus

This is an almost 7 minute animation featuring a digital elevation model (DEM) covering roughly 50 percent of Enceladus' surface. It is the most complex and by far the biggest animation I have ever done. The DEM is created from 55 of the images Cassini obtained during its three close flybys of Enceladus back in 2005. The flight path, viewing and illumination geometry is carefully selected to completely hide the fact that the DEM is not global. The DEM's resolution varies from ~70 to ~350 m/pixel. The field of view is 50 degrees.

The DEM is created using a very simple shape from shading algorithm (SFS) followed by 'destriping' and extensive post processing. A significant amount of the processing is based on (or some processing ideas were indirectly triggered by) various tips posted in several threads here (in particular, some of JohnVV's posts were helpful). All of this processing was done using a mix of ISIS 3, Photoshop and software written by myself. The individual frames were rendered using a renderer written by myself. The first frames were rendered in early December but due to the size of the DEM and this animation project several things have changed since then. The most significant change is that I finally built a 64 bit version of the renderer in early January (the DEM is too big to be easily manageable at close range using the old 32 bit version).

Since the DEM is created using SFS, vertical exaggeration is variable across the DEM. I tried to keep it uniform and close to 1 but this really is impossible to do accurately without combining the SFS DEM with another DEM created using stereo imaging. A lot of stereo coverage is available but I haven't done this yet since it takes a lot of time - I may do it later. Vertical exaggeration probably tends to be greater in the highest resolution patches than in the lower resolution areas. It should be noted that for Enceladus I used a uniformly white texture map, i.e. all of the details visible are from the DEM. Compared to the source images, resolution loss is minimal in the DEM.

There is probably sufficient medium to high resolution data available to make a global DEM with one exception: The north polar region. Hopefully Cassini manages to completely image the NPR at 300-500 m/pixel (or better - preferably 100-300 m/pixel) later in its mission.

A few sample frames:




Needless to say I recommend fullscreen viewing (and a biased comment: Looks awesome on a large TV screen).

[Zack Moratto]

A lot of stereo coverage is available but I haven't done this yet since it takes a lot of time - I may do it later.

Do you have a list of stereo pairs that could be processed? ISS images usually process pretty quickly in ASP and would make a fun test case for me. I could then share my results back to you via this thread.