SAR and Optical Image Registration Based on Uniform Feature Points Extraction and Consistency Gradient Calculation

Abstract

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites have an active sensor on board, which emits electromagnetic signals and measures the strength and time delay of the returned signal backscattered from ground objects. Optical images have rich spectral information, but it is easily affected by atmospheric attenuation and weather conditions. Thus, the study of the registration between these two images is of great significance. We present a novel method for SAR and optical image registration. In the stage of feature points extraction, the method combines phase consistency intensity screening and scale space grid division to obtain stable and uniform feature points from the image. During the stage of feature description, the method employs the extended phase consistency method to calculate the gradient amplitude and direction of the image, and improves the correctness of the main direction calculation and descriptor construction. Experimental results demonstrate its superior matching performance with respect to the state-of-the-art methods.