Automatic Registration between High Resolution SAR Image and GIS Road Network Based on Pairwise Constraint and ICM Optimization

Abstract

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) technique has been widely applied in disaster monitoring and evaluation, because of its all-weather and all-time capability. In particular, the integration of high resolution SAR image and GIS data has been proved to be an effective solution to change detection for rapid disaster response. However, accurate registration of SAR image and GIS data remains a challenging task. On the one hand, SAR image and GIS data are two different representation levels of the real world. GIS data lacks of grey value and texture information, thus traditional use of grey-based and texture-based feature descriptors for feature matching in GIS data is impossible. On the other hand, the extraction of matching primitives is difficult in the SAR image due to the speckle noise. Moreover, though features can be extracted in the SAR image, the matching can be difficult since features may be fractured and missing. In this paper, we propose a new method for vector-to-SAR image registration which utilizes conjugate line-pair intersections as matching primitives. The core idea consists in two aspects: 1) Different from traditional road intersection based registration methods, conjugate line-pair intersections are employed as matching primitive in the proposed method. 2) To find out the optimal set of matching features, a matching technique that using pairwise constraint and the iterative conditional mode (ICM) optimization algorithm is introduced. Experiment results proved the reliability and feasibility of the proposed method.