ROBUST REGISTRATION FOR OPTICAL AND SAR IMAGES BASED ON SPATIAL GEOMETRIC CONSTRAINT AND STRUCTURE FEATURES

Abstract. Automatic registration of optical and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is a challenging task due to significant geometric deformation and radiometric differences between two images. To address this issue, this paper proposes an automatic registration method for optical and SAR images based on spatial geometric constraint and structure features. Firstly, the Harris detector with a block strategy is used to extract evenly distributed feature points in the images. Subsequently, a local geometric correction is performed by using the Rational Function Model, which eliminates the rotation and scale differences between optical and SAR images. Secondly, orientated gradient information of images is used to construct a geometric structural feature descriptor. Then, the feature descriptor is transformed into the frequency domain, and the three-dimensional (3-D) phase correlation is used as the similarity metric to achieve correspondences by employing a template matching scheme. Finally, mismatches are eliminated based on spatial geometric constraint relationship between images, followed by a process of geometric correction to achieve the image registration. Experimental results with multiple high-resolution optical and SAR images show that the proposed method can achieve reliable registration accuracy, and outperforms the state of the art methods.