On Flexible Co-registration of Optical and SAR Satellite Images

Abstract

We consider the problem of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and optical satellite images co-registration in its special statement. Because of the distinct natures of SAR and optical images, there exist huge radiometric and geometric differences between such images. Their structure, intensity of pixels, and texture are drastically different. As a result, the traditional registration approaches are no longer applicable in this case and it makes the registration process challenging. Mostly motivated by the crop field monitoring problem, we propose a new statement for the co-registration of SAR and optical images. We discuss the consistency of the proposed statement of this problem, propose the scheme for its regularization, and derive the corresponding optimality system.