An Improved Image Registration Based on Nonsubsampled Contourlet Transform and Zernike Moments

Abstract

Feature-based registration is an effective and most widely used image registration method currently. It includes three critical steps, feature extraction, feature matching and transformation parameters estimation. This paper mainly explores the first two steps. In one of Chahira Serief’s paper about image registration, feature points extraction based on nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) was proposed and feature points matching based on Zernike moments was adopted. The registration accuracy and robustness of his algorithm are acceptable, but it can still be improved. In this paper, an improved scheme of this registration algorithm is proposed. The rotation invariance of NSCT-based feature points extraction is improved, which is beneficial to extract homologous feature points. And the reliability and effectiveness of Zernike momentsbased feature points matching are improved, which can improve the matching accuracy. The improved registration algorithm can realize registration of images related by larger scaling, rotation and translation transformation. The simulation results show that the registration robustness is further improved, and the registration accuracy is still high.