Fast and Robust Matching for Multimodal Remote Sensing Image Registration

• Published in: IEEE transactions on geoscience and remote sensing Vol. 57; no. 11; pp. 9059 - 9070
• Main Authors: Ye, Yuanxin, Bruzzone, Lorenzo, Shan, Jie, Bovolo, Francesca, Zhu, Qing
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.11.2019; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Computational efficiency; Computer applications; Computing time; Fast Fourier transform (FFT); Fast Fourier transformations; Feature extraction; Fourier transforms; Frameworks; Frequency-domain analysis; Gradients; Histograms; Image detection; Image matching; Image registration; Lidar; multimodal remote sensing images; pixelwise feature representation; Remote sensing; Representations; Robustness; SAR (radar); Self-similarity; Shape; Synthetic aperture radar; Template matching
• ISSN: 0196-2892; 1558-0644
• DOI: 10.1109/TGRS.2019.2924684

While image matching has been studied in remote sensing community for decades, matching multimodal data [e.g., optical, light detection and ranging (LiDAR), synthetic aperture radar (SAR), and map] remains a challenging problem because of significant nonlinear intensity differences between such data. To address this problem, we present a novel fast and robust template matching framework integrating local descriptors for multimodal images. First, a local descriptor [such as histogram of oriented gradient (HOG) and local self-similarity (LSS) or speeded-up robust feature (SURF)] is extracted at each pixel to form a pixelwise feature representation of an image. Then, we define a fast similarity measure based on the feature representation using the fast Fourier transform (FFT) in the frequency domain. A template matching strategy is employed to detect correspondences between images. In this procedure, we also propose a novel pixelwise feature representation using orientated gradients of images, which is named channel features of orientated gradients (CFOG). This novel feature is an extension of the pixelwise HOG descriptor with superior performance in image matching and computational efficiency. The major advantages of the proposed matching framework include: 1) structural similarity representation using the pixelwise feature description and 2) high computational efficiency due to the use of FFT. The proposed matching framework has been evaluated using many different types of multimodal images, and the results demonstrate its superior matching performance with respect to the state-of-the-art methods.