A New Lunar Dome Detection Method Based on Improved YOLOv7

Volcanism is an important geological evolutionary process on the Moon. The study of lunar volcanic features is of great significance and value to understanding the geological evolution of the Moon better. Lunar domes are one of the essential volcanic features of the Moon. However, the existing lunar dome detection methods are still traditional manual or semiautomatic identification approaches that require extensive prior knowledge and have a complex identification process. Therefore, this paper proposes an automatic detection method based on improved YOLOv7 for lunar dome detection. First, a new lunar dome dataset was created by digital elevation model (DEM) data, and the effective squeeze and excitation (ESE) attention mechanism module was added to the backbone and neck sections to reduce information loss in the feature map and enhance network expressiveness. Then, a new SPPCSPC-RFE module was proposed by adding the receptive field enhancement (RFE) module into the neck section, which can adapt to dome feature maps of different shapes and sizes. Finally, the bounding box regression loss function complete IOU (CIOU) was replaced by wise IOU (WIOU). The WIOU loss function improved the model’s performance for the dome detection effect. Furthermore, this study combined several data enhancement strategies to improve the robustness of the network. To evaluate the performance of the proposed model, we conducted several experiments using the dome dataset developed in this study. The experimental results indicate that the improved method outperforms related methods with a mean average precision (mAP@0.5) value of 88.7%, precision (P) value of 85.6%, and recall (R) value of 86.4%. This study provides an effective solution for lunar dome detection.