Registration Method between High Resolution Optical and SAR Images

Integration analysis of multi-sensor satellite images is becoming increasingly important. The first step in integration analysis is image registration between multi-sensor. SIFT (Scale Invariant Feature Transform) is a representative image registration method. However, optical image and SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) images are different from sensor attitude and radiation characteristics during acquisition, making it difficult to apply the conventional method, such as SIFT, because the radiometric characteristics between images are nonlinear. To overcome this limitation, we proposed a modified method that combines the SAR-SIFT method and shape descriptor vector DLSS(Dense Local Self-Similarity). We conducted an experiment using two pairs of Cosmo-SkyMed and KOMPSAT-2 images collected over Daejeon, Korea, an area with a high density of buildings. The proposed method extracted the correct matching points when compared to conventional methods, such as SIFT and SAR-SIFT . The method also gave quantitatively reasonable results for RMSE of 1.66m and 2.45m over the two pairs of images.