Optical and SAR Image Dense Registration Using a Robust Deep Optical Flow Framework

Abstract

The coregistration of optical and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imageries is the bottleneck in exploring the complementary information from the two multimodal datasets. The difficulties lie in not only the complex radiometric relationship between them, but also the distinct geometrical models of the optical and SAR imaging systems, which cause it nontrivial to explicitly depict the spatial relationship between the corresponding image regions when elevation fluctuations exist. This article aims to investigate the optical flow technique for the pixelwise dense registration of the high-resolution optical and SAR images, so as to get rid of the outlier removal and geometric mapping procedures, which have to be conducted in the classical image registration approaches that are based on sparse feature point matching. Herein, a deep optical flow framework is designed. First, a dilated feature concatenation method is proposed to enhance the discriminability of the pixelwise features for similarity measurement. An effective network training strategy is used, based on a smoothed flow loss, and also a training dataset that contains simulated elevation fluctuations. Second, we propose a self-supervised optical flow fine-tuning strategy. It incorporates the strength of the blockwise matching approach, which produces better matching precision, into the proposed pixelwise matching procedure. In this way, the accuracy of the optical-SAR dense registration is substantially improved. Extensive experiments conducted on the 1-m resolution optical-SAR image pairs of different land-cover types and distinct topographic conditions indicate that the proposed optical-SAR optical flow network -Ft framework is quite robust, and has the potential to perform the optical-SAR image dense registration in practical applications. The Python code of the proposed deep optical flow network will be made available.