SEMI AUTOMATIC REGISTRATION OF PARTIALLY OVERLAPPED AERIAL IMAGES VIA PATTERN SEARCH METHOD

Abstract

This paper presents a semi-automatic registration algorithm for partially overlapped aerial images which has been successfully tested with images of the Mississippi Delta area. In this algorithm, each individual aerial image is registered by employing a pattern search method. This pattern search method considers an affine transformation without shear as a 5-parameter vector and searches toward the gradient direction that results in higher similarity values between the reference and the sensed images. The registration of the first aerial image requires some initial manual work. After the registration of the first image, based on the overlap of the neighboring images and the existing transformation parameters for the first image, the search starting point of the second image can be automatically obtained for the registration of the second image. This process can be repeated for the remaining aerial images in a sequential order. Experimental results with 12 sample images demonstrate the success of this algorithm.