An Adaptive SAR and Optical Images Registration Approach Based on SOI-SIFT

Abstract

SAR and optical images registration is a key step for remote sensing image processing, match navigation and information fusion. Although there are many methods for SAR images registration, their performance will decrease between SAR and optical images. Moreover, these algorithms suffer from lack of matching pairs of the feature points and uneven distribution between SAR and optical images. Therefore, they cannot accurately achieve the registration between optical and SAR images. To solve the above deficiencies, we propose an efficient image registration approach based on SAR and optical image-scale invariant feature transform (SOI-SIFT). Firstly, a linear edge enhancement based on gray feature and histogram equalization is introduced. In this stage, we enhance the edge features of the image so that the number of image feature points can be greatly increased. Then, for feature points purification, we use fast sample consensus algorithm to filter duplicate and wrong matching feature points. SOI-SIFT can be more adapted to the heterogeneous image matching. Experimental results have shown the superiorities of the proposed method.