Adaptation and Evaluation of an Optical Flow Method Applied to Coregistration of Forest Remote Sensing Images

Abstract

The coregistration of heterogeneous geospatial images is useful in various remote sensing applications. Since the number of available data increases and the resolution improves, it is interesting to have an approach as automated, fast, robust, and accurate as possible. In this paper, we present a solution based on optical-flow computation. This algorithm called GeFolki allows the registration of images in a nonparametric and dense way. GeFolki is based on a local method of optical flow derived from the Lucas–Kanade algorithm, with a multiscale implementation, and a specific filtering including rank filtering, rolling guidance filtering and local contrast inversion. The efficiency of our coregistration chain is shown on radar, LIDAR, and optical images on Remningstorp forest in Sweden. An analysis of the relevant parameters is investigated for several scenarios. Finally, we demonstrate the accuracy of our coregistration by proposing specific metrics for LIDAR/radar coregistration, and optics/radar coregistration.