From the Moon to Mercury: Release of Global Crater Catalogs Using Multimodal Deep Learning for Crater Detection and Morphometric Analysis

This study has compiled the first impact-crater dataset for Mercury with diameters greater than 400 m by a multimodal deep-learning pipeline. We present an enhanced deep learning framework for large-scale planetary crater detection, extending the YOLOLens architecture through the integration of multimodal inputs: optical imagery, digital terrain models (DTMs), and hillshade derivatives. By incorporating morphometric data, the model achieves robust detection of impact craters that are often imperceptible in optical imagery alone, especially in regions affected by low contrast, degraded rims, or shadow-dominated illumination. The resulting catalogs LU6M371TGT for the Moon and ME6M300TGT for Mercury constitute the most comprehensive automated crater inventories to date, demonstrating the effectiveness of multimodal learning and cross-planet transfer. This work highlights the critical role of terrain information in planetary object detection and establishes a scalable, high-throughput pipeline for planetary surface analysis using modern deep learning tools. To validate the pipeline, we compare its predictions against the manually annotated catalogs for the Moon, Mercury, and several regional inventories, observing close agreement across the full diameter spectrum, revealing a high level of confidence in our approach. This work presents a spatial density analysis, comparing the spatial density maps of small and large craters highlighting the uneven distribution of crater sizes across Mercury. We explore the prevalence of kilometer-scale (1–5 km range) impact craters, demonstrating that these dominate the crater population in certain regions of Mercury’s surface.