Multi-Scale Fused SAR Image Registration Based on Deep Forest

Abstract

SAR image registration is a crucial problem in SAR image processing since the registration results with high precision are conducive to improving the quality of other problems, such as change detection of SAR images. Recently, for most DL-based SAR image registration methods, the problem of SAR image registration has been regarded as a binary classification problem with matching and non-matching categories to construct the training model, where a fixed scale is generally set to capture pair image blocks corresponding to key points to generate the training set, whereas it is known that image blocks with different scales contain different information, which affects the performance of registration. Moreover, the number of key points is not enough to generate a mass of class-balance training samples. Hence, we proposed a new method of SAR image registration that meanwhile utilizes the information of multiple scales to construct the matching models. Specifically, considering that the number of training samples is small, deep forest was employed to train multiple matching models. Moreover, a multi-scale fusion strategy is proposed to integrate the multiple predictions and obtain the best pair matching points between the reference image and the sensed image. Finally, experimental results on four datasets illustrate that the proposed method is better than the compared state-of-the-art methods, and the analyses for different scales also indicate that the fusion of multiple scales is more effective and more robust for SAR image registration than one single fixed scale.