MEX VMC - Back on, and online! Options

[djellison]

Handel wrote the Hallelujah Chorus for this exact moment.

[mhoward]

LOVE the movies.

[Juramike]

I made an LRGB image to try to enhance contrast in the Valles Marineris image.

To make the luminance layer, I used the "Emily" channel mix and looked at a bright region and a dark region to try to find the optimum combination for the black and white conversion. A bright region "box" was defined around Candor Mensa and the median and standard deviations of the pixel values selected. A dark region box was also selected, as well as a good variance box.



Examining the pixel values, the standard deviation inside the bright or dark boxes is about the same in all the channels (good!)
The standard deviation is the highest in the Variation box in the red channel.

The red channel has also the largest difference between bright and dark pixel values, followed by the green channel.

From all this, it looks like the most information is in the red channel, followed closely by the green, and the blue channel is kinda worthless in the chasms.

So the black and white conversion weighs heavily on the yellow and green, followed by the red. (Ideally, more red should be used, but fiddling revealed that the center regions would blow out quickly).

So the Black and white conversion layer settings to create the luminance layer are:
Red +60%
Yellow +70%
Green +70%
Cyan +20%
Blue +50%
Magenta +50% [not much in the image at all]

-Mike

[Juramike]

Here is the RGB image compared with the HiPass Superresolution LRGB image in the area near Candor Mensa.
(HiPass 30 pixel, color layer gaussian blurred 5 pixels)



The color is less "speckly" in the LRGB image, probably due to the Gaussian blur of the color image.

-Mike

[Juramike]

Using the filenames, it seems images less than 116 seconds apart can be reasonably overlaid.



For images greater than 232 seconds, the spacecraft motion (at this altitude) causes enough of a perspective change that manual warping is necessary to overlay similar images. For example, images No.2 and No.6 were significantly different.


Here's an attempt at a super-resolution combination using only Image No. 2 and a manually warped Image No. 6:

The subtle differences even due to my limited warping capability are enough to make the lower dark patch blurry.

Bottom line: group files that are within a max range of 120 seconds.


[On a really close pass, it might be interesting to have a rapid fire cycle of 3 or 4 exposures of the same duration, then a second set of 3 or 4 at a different exposures of longer/shorter duration. Then a super-resolution image might could get made.]

[Juramike]

Final mosaic of Valles Marineris prepared from MEX VMC images:



Much higher resolution (2 km/pixel) TIFF image here [5.5 Mb at highest resolution]: http://www.flickr.com/photos/31678681@N07/4152369836/

-Mike

[tedstryk]

Nice work! All this is making me miss the days when I had time to process images

[Juramike]

Here's a blink comparison between a Viking 1&2 mosaic (PIA00422) and the MEX-VMC HDR Super-res HiPassLRGB composite. Features as small as 20 km can be discerned in the MEX-VMC composite.


(Animated GIF - click to animate)

Static view:


-Mike

[EDIT: Added an annotated version of MEX VMC composite with 26 features added as notes on flickr page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/31678681@N07/4153691165/]

[elakdawalla]

CODE

for %f in (c:\temp\*.raw) do vmc2rgb.exe %f

Handel wrote the Hallelujah Chorus for this exact moment.

My lateness to this particular party does not make my agreement with this statement any less hearty.

Though I think right now it's that massive C major chord from Handel's "Creation" blasting in my head!! and there was....LIGHT!!!

[djellison]

And...there....were..... FIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIILES!

(I always resented the bass-part going down on that cadence rather than up)

[elakdawalla]

I've gone silent on this topic because I'm in the middle of a big project with it -- I methodically downloaded all the RAWs, then used Helvick's trick and Gordan's executable to convert them all and now I'm inspecting every set and taking notes on which ones are worth processing. I'm about halfway through that process. Ask me very nicely once I'm done and I may zip up the "worth processing" ones into a single downloadable file

[ormstont]

Hi all!

Still very much looking forward to seeing the results of the processing efforts going on but just wanted to give you a heads up on some images dumped this morning. We got an opportunity to do a low-altitude limb pass so caught quite a few shots of the planet limb and there appear to be some very interesting clouds on these images. You can take a look here:

http://webservices.esa.int/blog/post/6/932

Enjoy!

[machi]

Nice!
Three sets in one day (14.12.2009), I think, this is new record!

[mhoward]

Looks like Emily finished her project. Awesome poster!

[elakdawalla]

Thanks! For some reason I didn't notice until just now that I'd managed to post a version with the space not yet adjusted to be black. I've fixed the version posted in the blog, am working on the Cafepress version now.