Co-registration of multispectral images for enhanced target recognition

Abstract

Unlike straightforward registration problems encountered in broadband imaging, spectral imaging in fielded instruments often suffers from a combination of imaging aberrations that make spatial co-registration of the images a challenging problem. Depending on the sensor architecture, typical problems to be mitigated include differing focus, magnification, and warping between the images in the various spectral bands due to optics differences; scene shift between spectral images due to parallax; and scene shift due to temporal misregistration between the spectral images. However, typical spectral images sometimes contain scene commonalities that can be exploited in traditional ways. As a first step toward automatic spatial co-registration for spectral images, we exploit manually-selected scene commonalities to produce transformation parameters in a four-channel spectral imager. The four bands consist of two mid-wave infrared channels and two short-wave infrared channels. Each of the four bands is blurred differently due to differing focal lengths of the imaging optics, magnified differently, warped differently, and translated differently. Centroid location techniques are used on the scene commonalities in order to generate sub-pixel values for the fiducial markers used in the transformation polygons, and conclusions are drawn about the effectiveness of such techniques in spectral imaging applications.