DBYOLO: Dual-Backbone YOLO Network for Lunar Crater Detection

Craters are among the most prominent and significant geomorphological features on the lunar surface. The complex and variable environment of the lunar surface, which is characterized by diverse textures, lighting conditions, and terrain variations, poses significant challenges to existing crater detection methods. To address these challenges, this study introduces DBYOLO, an innovative deep learning framework designed for lunar crater detection, leveraging a dual-backbone feature fusion network, with two key innovations. The first innovation is a lightweight dual-backbone network that processes Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) CCD images and Digital Terrain Model (DTM) data separately, extracting texture and edge features from CCD images and terrain depth features from DTM data. The second innovation is a feature fusion module with attention mechanisms that is used to dynamically integrate multi-source data, enabling the efficient extraction of complementary information from both CCD images and DTM data, enhancing crater detection performance in complex lunar surface environments. Experimental results demonstrate that DBYOLO, with only 3.6 million parameters, achieves a precision of 77.2%, recall of 70.3%, mAP50 of 79.4%, and mAP50-95 of 50.4%, representing improvements of 3.1%, 1.8%, 3.1%, and 2.6%, respectively, over the baseline model before modifications. This showcases an overall performance enhancement, providing a new solution for lunar crater detection and offering significant support for future lunar exploration efforts.