Mars Orbital Images of Fresh Impacts from CTX: 6,829 Positive and Negative Examples
by Michael J. Munje / Jet Propulsion Laboratory
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Description
Michael J. Munje of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory compiled 6,829 cropped orbital images from the Context Camera (CTX) on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The dataset contains 6,156 training images and 673 validation images, each a 300x300 pixel (1.8 x 1.8 km) crop, labeled for fresh impact craters versus random background terrain. Training images include five augmented versions per original, generated via flips, rotations, adjustments, and blurring.
Use Cases
Training image classifiers to detect fresh impact craters based on labeled positive and negative examples.
Benchmarking computer vision models on planetary science imagery using the provided training/validation split.
Studying the visual characteristics of recent Martian surface changes using cropped high-resolution orbital images.
Applying data augmentation techniques (flips, rotations, adjustments, blur) to a domain-specific image dataset.
Strengths
Dataset contains 6,829 specifically cropped and labeled images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's Context Camera.
Includes 6,156 training images with five distinct augmented versions per image, expanding the effective training set.
Images are cropped to a consistent 300x300 pixel size at 6 meters per pixel, covering roughly 1.8 x 1.8 km areas.
Labels for positive (fresh impact) and negative (random background) examples are embedded in the filenames for straightforward identification.
Limitations
Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.
The dataset's spatial and temporal coverage is not explicitly detailed beyond being derived from a catalog of fresh impacts.
Provenance
Source
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, derived from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Context Camera (CTX) imagery.
Collection Method
Images were cropped from CTX observations, with positive examples centered on known fresh impacts from a catalog and negative examples from random sampling.
Geography
Mars
Labels are indicated in filenames: positive examples start with '0' and negative examples start with a '-' (negative sign). Augmented versions are provided only for the training data.