Automatic and timely image registration and alignment for producing highly accurate geodetic coordinates is of interest to tactical systems involved in battlespace awareness. We present an approach to registration that applies rigorous photogrammetric techniques to sensor geometry models to achieve registration accuracy of only a few pixels. Image collection is fully modeled in terms of its static geometry including aircraft and sensor parameters. The registration process not only aligns imagery, but also significantly reduces geoposition errors when multiple images are used. A normalized cross- correlation is applied to align image pixels through adjustments to the initial collection geometry. Our process is fully automatic and requires no operator intervention. This technique has a side benefit that the amount of time to register images is somewhat independent of the image size. Registration can be applied to imagery from disparate sensors, such as Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), Electro- Optical (EO), Multi-Spectral, and Infrared, in a multi- sensor fusion approach to reduce geodetic errors. This approach is implemented on standard Commercial-Off-The-Shelf hardware and has been tested on SAR and EO imagery at near real-time processing rates.

Date Published: 27 July 2000
PDF: 11 pages
Proc. SPIE 4054, Automated Geo-Spatial Image and Data Exploitation, (27 July 2000); doi: 10.1117/12.394103

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 4054:
Automated Geo-Spatial Image and Data Exploitation
William E. Roper; Mark K. Hamilton, Editor(s)