Coarse-to-Fine Image Registration for Multi-Temporal High Resolution Remote Sensing Based on a Low-Rank Constraint

Abstract

For multi-temporal high resolution remote sensing images, the image registration is important but difficult due to the high resolution and low-stability land-cover. Especially, the changing of land-cover, solar altitude angle, radiation intensity, and terrain fluctuation distortion in the overlapping areas can represent different image characteristics. These time-varying properties cause traditional registration methods with known reference information to fault. Therefore, in this paper we propose a comprehensive coarse-to-fine registration (CCFR) algorithm. First, we design a low-rank constraint-based batch reference extraction (LRC-BRE) method. Under the low-rank constraint, the stable features with highly spatial co-occurrence can be reconstructed via matrix decomposition, and are set as reference images to batch registration. Second, we improve the general feature registration with block feature matching and local linear transformation (BFM-LLT) operators including match outlier filtering (MOF) on regional mutual information and dual-weighted block fitting (DWBF). Finally, based on combining LRC-BRE and BFM-LLT, CCFR is integrated. Experimental results show that the proposed method has a good batch alignment effect, especially in the registration of large difference image pairs. The proposed CCFR achieves a significant performance improvement over many state-of-the-art registration algorithms.