Automatic Parameter Selection for Intensity-Based Registration of Imagery to LiDAR Data

Abstract

Automatic registration of multisensor data, for example, imagery and Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR), is a basic step in data fusion in the field of geospatial information processing. Mutual information (MI) has recently attracted research attention as a statistical similarity measure for intensity-based registration of multisensor images in the related fields of computer vision and remote sensing. Since MI-based registration methods rely on joint probability density functions (pdfs) for the data sets, errors in pdf estimation can affect the MI value, causing registration failure due to the presence of nonmonotonic surfaces of similarity measure. The quality of the estimated pdf is highly dependent upon both the bin size and the smoothing technique used in the pdf estimation procedure. The lack of a general approach to assign an appropriate bin size value for the pdf of multisensor data reduces both the level of automation and the robustness of the registration. In this paper, a novel bin size selection approach is proposed to improve registration reliability. The proposed method determines the best (uniform or variable) bin size for the pdf estimation via an analysis of the relationship between the similarity measure values of the data and the adopted geometric transformation. This highlights the role of the component of MI sensitive to the transformation, rather than the MI component that is unrelated to the transformation, such as noise. The performance of the proposed method for the registration of aerial imagery to LiDAR point clouds is investigated, and experimental results are compared with those achieved through a feature-based registration method.