[Submitted on 17 Sep 2026]
Title:MarsFM: Shading-Regularized Flow Matching for Martian Relief Estimation
View a PDF of the paper titled MarsFM: Shading-Regularized Flow Matching for Martian Relief Estimation, by Marius F. R. Juston
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Abstract: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: this https URL code: this https URL.
Comments: 73 pages, 62 figures
Subjects:
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)
Cite as: arXiv:2609.21095 [cs.CV]
(or arXiv:2609.21095v1 [cs.CV] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.21095
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Marius Juston [view email] [v1] Thu, 17 Sep 2026 21:15:01 UTC (44,102 KB)
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