Registration of two or more complex images of the same scene is an important procedure in InSAR (Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar) image processing. Meanwhile, the accuracy of this step is crucial to the reliability of subsequent image processing and final results of the data processing chain. This paper presents a robust method which introduces the coarse-to-fine strategy, relaxation optimization technology and Maximum Spectrum Method to obtain the dense, reliable and accurate conjugate points for the registration of two single looking complex (SLC) SAR images. In each pyramid image, we extract the feature points using the Moravec interest operator, and then perform matching for feature points to find their candidate conjugate points whose correlation coefficient is above certain threshold, and through relaxation technology to find the best matcher. The matching result at higher pyramid level is then used to guide and limit the search space for the matching in the lower level. Perform above procedure iteratively until to the original image, the Maximum Spectrum Method is carried out to refine the matching accuracy to the sub-pixel. After determining dozens of thousands conjugate points on master and slave image, we can form the transformation model between them and perform image correction. We have made experiments to validate our method, and it comes to the conclusion that with coarse-to-fine strategy, global relaxation and Maximum Spectrum Method, it efficiently reduces the matching error and improves matching precision.

Date Published: 30 October 2009
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 7494, MIPPR 2009: Multispectral Image Acquisition and Processing, 74941A (30 October 2009); doi: 10.1117/12.832434

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 7494:
MIPPR 2009: Multispectral Image Acquisition and Processing
Faxiong Zhang; Faxiong Zhang, Editor(s)