A Method of Airborne Infrared and Visible Image Matching Based on HOG Feature

In the all-time matching and navigation task, the aircraft applies real-time infrared images acquired by infrared imagery sensor to match the referenced visible image provided by the satellite for accurate location. However, the large difference between the infrared image and the visible image makes the task challenging. In this paper, for the sake of engineering application in the avionics system, we obtain real-time infrared images according to the flight trajectory, and then use them to match the referenced visible images. Furthermore, the HOG features are extracted respectively from real-time infrared images and referenced visible images to describe their feature similarity, for the purpose of accurate matching and localization. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method can not only realize the matching between airborne infrared and visible images, but also achieve high location accuracy, which shows good performance and robustness.