Abstract
Boulder-sized clasts are common on the surface of Mars, and many are
sufficiently large to be resolved by the High Resolution Imaging Science
Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).
The size, number, and location of boulders on the surface and their
spatial distribution can reveal the processes that have operated on the
surface, including boulder erosion, burial, impact excavation, and other
mechanisms of boulder transport and generation. However, quantitative
analysis of statistically significant boulder populations which could
inform these processes entails prohibitively laborious manual
segmentation, granulometry and morphometry measurements over large
areas. Here we develop and describe an automated tool to locate and
measure boulders on the martian surface: the Martian Boulder Automatic
Recognition System (MBARS). The open-source Python-based toolkit
autonomously measures boulder diameter and height in HiRISE images
enabling rapid and accurate assessments of boulder populations. We
compare our algorithm with existing boulder-counting methodologies,
manual analyses, and objects of known size to verify accuracy and
precision. Additionally, we test MBARS quantitatively characterizing
boulders around an impact crater in the martian northern lowlands. We
compare this to previous work on rock excavation during impact cratering
using manually counted boulders around lunar craters.