Minimising the co-registration window size for SAR image pairs

Abstract

Due to the presence of SAR speckle noise, co-registration of SAR image pairs typically involves local area rather than feature based matching. In some cases, e.g. airborne acquired SAR image pairs the local co-registration parameters change relatively quickly and nonsystematically across the imaged scene. Highly localised co-registration, that is a small local area window size is consequently required. Too small a window size however, can lead to inaccurate estimation of the co-registration parameters. This paper presents a theoretically based procedure for minimising the window size while retaining confidence in the co-registration accuracy. Results of an experimental study are included.