Abstract
Abstract. Image registration is required for different remote sensing applications, like change detection or image fusion. Since research studies have shown the outstanding absolute geometric accuracy of high resolution radar satellites images like TerraSAR-X, the importance of SAR images as source for geolocation enhancement has increased. Due to this fact, multi-sensor image to image registration of optical and SAR images can be used for the improvement of the absolute geometric processing and accuracy of optical images with TerraSAR-X as reference. In comparison to the common optical and SAR image registration methods the proposed method is a combination of intensity-based and feature-based approaches. The proposed method avoids the direct and often difficult detection of features from the SAR images. SAR-like templates are generated from features detected from the optical image. These templates are used for an intensity-based matching with the SAR image. The results of the matching process are ground control points, which are used for the estimation of translation parameters followed by a subpixel translation of the optical image. The proposed image registration method is tested for two pairs of TerraSAR-X and QuickBird images and one pair of TerraSAR-X andWorldView-2 images of a suburban area. The results show that with the proposed method the geometric accuracy of optical images can be enhanced.
Highlights
Image registration is an on-going research topic and required for different applications in remote sensing, like change detection or image fusion
Core differences in the sensor geometry and radiometry of the optical and SAR sensors are challenging for the registration of the images acquired by such sensors
The image registration chain described in Section 2. is tested on two pairs of QuickBird and TerraSAR-X and one pair of WorldView-2 and TerraSAR-X images of a suburban area
Summary
Image registration is an on-going research topic and required for different applications in remote sensing, like change detection or image fusion. Since research studies have shown the outstanding absolute geometric accuracy of high resolution radar satellite images like TerraSAR-X (Ager and Bresnahan, 2009), the impact of SAR images as source for geolocation enhancement, especially for image registration, has increased. An important application of optical and SAR image registration is presented in the work of Reinartz et al (2011) and Perko et al (2011). In these papers, the absolute geometric processing and accuracy of optical images are improved by using ground control points (GCPs) selected from high resolution TerraSARX reference images. These papers show how the precision of high resolution SAR images can be used to improve the geometric accuracy of optical satellite data
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