Remote Sensing Image Registration Based on Local Affine Constraint With Circle Descriptor

Many methods have been developed to improve the performance of image registration. In this letter, we introduce a novel method based on a local affine constraint for remote sensing image registration, which can be widely used in image processing and pattern recognition. Our algorithm has three components. First, we exploit the scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) method to extract feature points and calculate the gradient magnitude to establish feature descriptors with a circular instead of square neighborhood. Second, an initial matching is implemented by the nearest neighbor distance ratio (NNDR) and the fast sample consensus (FSC) algorithm. Finally, fine registration is established using more correct matches obtained by the local affine transformation circular region search algorithm. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves subpixel accuracy. In addition, both the correct matching rate and registration demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method.