An accurate and robust registration framework based on outlier removal and feature point adjustment for remote sensing images

The reliability of feature matching can decide the accuracy and robustness of the feature-based registration result. Aiming at the problem that the number of final feature matches preserved by many popular outlier removal methods is small, and the position accuracy of final feature matches is not high enough, we propose an accurate and robust image registration framework based on outlier removal and feature point adjustment in this paper. This framework increases the number and improves the position accuracy of inliers while eliminating most outliers. The increased number of inliers improves the robustness of image registration, and high accurate inliers improves the accuracy of image registration. Firstly, the initial feature matches are extracted by a commonly used feature-based registration method, such as the scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT)-based method. Then, outliers of the initial feature matches are eliminated by a frequency domain similarity measure, called PHase-based Structural SIMilarity (PH-SSIM) proposed in this paper. Considering the inherent error of the feature matches that still exist after the outlier elimination, a PH-SSIM-based feature point adjustment strategy is designed to fine-adjust the position of the preserved feature points in the reference image. Finally, the registration parameters are calculated by the fine-adjusted feature matches. The proposed framework has been evaluated by several remote sensing images with different resolution, grey-scale, texture, and scene, and compared with four state-of-the-art image registration methods. Experimental result demonstrates the high accuracy and robustness of the proposed method.