Improved speeded-up robust features registration method based on particle swarm and gray wolf algorithm for coal mine images

Abstract

Image registration is an electronic imaging technology that matches two or more images acquired at different times or under different conditions. Here, we highlight the application of image registration in monitoring robots (e.g., autonomous vehicles) of coal mines. In image registration processing, the scale-invariant feature transform algorithm and its improved versions achieve poor extraction effects for feature points on smooth-edge curves. In comparison, the speeded-up robust features (SURF) algorithm achieves more stable registration results in various images. To improve the accuracy of the SURF algorithm, it is optimized using the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm and several improved PSOs, but it achieves unstable accuracy. Therefore, we optimize the improved gray wolf algorithm (IGWO) using advanced mathematical models in several computing steps. We add the memory function of both experienced individual and group optimal locations in PSO to update the particle positions. The evaluations performed on different datasets show that the accuracy and range of registration are substantially improved by IGWO and IGWO-PSO; however, the running time is extended. Thus, our improved method is competitive with other state-of-the-art image registration methods.