A Gaussian filter-based window for efficient SAR image matching

Abstract

ABSTRACT Repeatability of the extracted features and the distinctiveness of the descriptors have been the critical factors in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image matching. These factors are significantly affected by the presence of multiplicative speckle noise in SAR images. In order to address these issues, a Gaussian filter-based SAR image matching scheme is proposed in this paper. At first, the scale-invariant feature transform is combined with the Gaussian filter-based ratio operator for the extraction of more repeatable features from the input images. Then, the descriptors of the extracted features are constructed by using a Gaussian filter-based window. Finally, the input SAR images are matched through a feature-matching operation. The proposed method can obtain better repeatability and more correct matches than the state-of-the-art methods.