Along-Track and Cross-Track Noise Analysis of Altimeter Data Using Tensors

Abstract

The exploration of planetary surfaces lies on images and topographic data, typically derived by laser altimetry from planetary missions. This paper deals with an examination of the topography data from the Mars orbiter laser altimeter (MOLA). MOLA data to be processed is massive and 3D dimensional but the obtained resolution of the martian surface is limited to the altimeter data density, especially along the cross-track directions. Therefor a tensor representation can be used to model these types of noise. In this paper an approach to assessing along-track and crosstrack noise on altimeter data using a tensor decomposition is proposed. Experimental results show that the quality of the reconstituted signal in the different planes are excellent.