A Novel Coarse-to-Fine Scheme for Remote Sensing Image Registration Based on SIFT and Phase Correlation

Automatic image registration has been wildly used in remote sensing applications. However, the feature-based registration method is sometimes inaccurate and unstable for images with large scale difference, grayscale and texture differences. In this manuscript, a coarse-to-fine registration scheme is proposed, which combines the advantage of feature-based registration and phase correlation-based registration. The scheme consists of four steps. First, feature-based registration method is adopted for coarse registration. A geometrical outlier removal method is applied to improve the accuracy of coarse registration, which uses geometric similarities of inliers. Then, the sensed image is modified through the coarse registration result under affine deformation model. After that, the modified sensed image is registered to the reference image by extended phase correlation. Lastly, the final registration results are calculated by the fusion of the coarse registration and the fine registration. High universality of feature-based registration and high accuracy of extended phase correlation-based registration are both preserved in the proposed method. Experimental results of several different remote sensing images, which come from several published image registration papers, demonstrate the high robustness and accuracy of the proposed method. The evaluation contains root mean square error (RMSE), Laplace mean square error (LMSE) and red-green image registration results.