MetaMars: 3DoF+ Roaming With Panoramic Stitching for Tianwen-1 Mission

In China’s Tianwen-1 mission for Mars exploration, Zhurong rover carries the Navigation and Terrain Camera (NaTeCam) and collects a lot of terrains and topographic data. For the scientific popularization of Mars, a virtual reality roaming based on panoramic stitching presents the Martian surface in detail and provides an immersive experience for users. However, the current Mars roaming systems focus on global information instead of details, and the traditional panoramic stitching methods are not suitable for Mars images. This letter proposes a panoramic stitching method and develops a 3DoF+ Mars roaming system. The proposed stitching-combines-features-and-projection (SCFP) jointly considers the extracted features of images and projection based on intrinsic camera parameters, which improves the matching effect and execution efficiency. Experimental results indicate that the SCFP reduces the computational time and improves stitching results than state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, we design and deploy the 3DoF+ roaming system based on panoramic stitching with datasets obtained from the Tianwen-1 mission.