Impacted craters are commonly found on the surface of planets, satellites, asteroids and other solar system bodies. In order to speed up the rate of constructing the database of craters, it is important to develop crater detection algorithms. This paper presents a novel approach to automatically detect craters on planetary surfaces. The approach contains two parts： crater candidate region selection and crater detection. In the first part, crater candidate region selection is achieved by Kanade-Lucas-Tomasi （KLT） detector. Matrix-pattern-oriented least squares support vector machine （MatLSSVM）, as the matrixization version of least square support vector machine （SVM）, inherits the advantages of least squares support vector machine （LSSVM）, reduces storage space greatly and reserves spatial redundancies within each image matrix compared with general LSSVM. The second part of the approach employs MatLSSVM to design classifier for crater detection. Experimental results on the dataset which comprises 160 preprocessed image patches from Google Mars demonstrate that the accuracy rate of crater detection can be up to 88%. In addition, the outstanding feature of the approach introduced in this paper is that it takes resized crater candidate region as input pattern directly to finish crater detection. The results of the last experiment demonstrate that MatLSSVM-based classifier can detect crater regions effectively on the basis of KLT-based crater candidate region selection.
