MarsRecon: Self-Supervised and Multimodal Surface Representations for Mars

Aerial navigation on Mars requires vision-based pipelines that are robust to the diverse illumination conditions and terrain morphology of the Martian surface. A key bottleneck for training and evaluating such methods is the scarcity of large-scale, annotated aerial datasets. We present MARTIAN, an open-source Blender-based rendering framework that leverages real HiRISE orbital map products to synthesize realistic aerial views of the Martian terrain under controllable lighting conditions and at varying altitudes. MARTIAN generates observations with accurate pose annotations, directly addressing the scarcity of training data for vision-based navigation on Mars. The framework has been validated through its deployment in concurrent work on map-based localization systems for Ingenuity and future Mars rotorcraft, where synthetically trained deep image matchers were successfully evaluated on real Mars imagery. MARTIAN is publicly available at: https://github.com/nasa-jpl/martian.

We present MarsFM, an image-conditioned latent flow-matching model for local Martian relief estimation from single-band HiRISE RED orthoimagery. The method combines a pretrained generative prior with stereo-derived geometric supervision and a differentiable Lunar--Lambert shading objective. Relief, normal, gradient, curvature, and ordinal terms constrain complementary aspects of terrain structure, while a positive-affine-invariant image comparison constrains rendered appearance. An evaluation comprising 2024 gathered patch records per integration-step count yields mean affine-aligned RMSE between 0.0935 and 0.0957 in normalized signed-log relief space for one to twenty Euler steps. These scores measure agreement with VAE-reconstructed references on positive-reference support. Their narrow range supports low-step inference under this protocol. Spatial, differential, and spectral diagnostics show broad terrain correspondence alongside smoothing, amplitude compression, and boundary mismatch. MarsFM provides a framework for combining learned terrain priors with image-based constraints; establishing improved physical terrain resolution requires matched baselines and independent high-resolution reference data. Data: https://huggingface.co/datasets/SuperComputer/mars_hirise_dtm_processed-6aa9b66ba461e07f; code: https://github.com/Marius-Juston/MarsRecon.

The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) acquires imagery of Mars at 25--30 cm/pixel, supporting studies of martian geology, climate history, and landing-site characterization. Its 14-detector focal plane assembly includes several overlapping detectors that enable the acquisition of three-channel colour-infrared images, which are important for identifying compositional variations and studying active surface processes. In 2023, a detector in the center of the focal plane assembly (RED4) began failing intermittently, creating a gap in acquired imagery and reducing the instrument's colour-imaging capability by half. The HiRISE processing pipeline provides a synthetic red (SYN4) channel obtained by linearly scaling the co-located infrared (IR10) channel. However, this approach cannot capture observed non-linear relationships between the colour channels, limiting its accuracy and applicability. Here, we present HiPredict, a machine-learning framework that reconstructs RED4 from co-located IR10 and blue-green (BG12) imagery, neighbouring red-channel observations, and acquisition metadata. The model employs a U-Net architecture to learn non-linear spatiotemporal-spectral relationships between these inputs and is trained on 81,717 training samples, representing 13,625 observations. Evaluated on 23,348 test samples, representing 3,892 pre-failure observations, HiPredict reconstructs RED4 with a Normalised Mean Absolute Error of 1.1%, substantially outperforming SYN4 (3.1%). The reconstructed products improve colour image recovery and more closely represent features of interest such as icy craters, stratigraphy exposed along ridge crests and chloride deposits. We release HiPredict as an open software tool. This work demonstrates the potential of machine learning to mitigate data loss as planetary missions age and naturally degrade.