A Modified Corner Detector for SAR Images Registration

Abstract

As a first step for image processing operations, detection of corners is a vital procedure where it can be applied for many applications as feature matching, image registration, image mosaicking, image fusion, and change detection. Image registration can be defined as process of getting the misalignment of pixel's position between two or more images. In this paper, a modified corner detector named Synthetic Aperture Radar-Phase Congruency Harris (SAR-PCH) based on a combination between both phase congruency, named later PC, and Harris corner detector is proposed where PC image can supply fundamental and significative features although the complex changes of intensities. Also, the proposed approach overcomes the Harris limitation concerning the noise since the Harris is more sensitive to the noise. The performance was similitude with Shi-Tomasi, FAST, and Harris corner detectors where experiments are conducted first with simulated images and second with real ones. Mean square error (MSE) and peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) are used for the simile. Experimental results, carried out in a standard computer, verify its effectiveness where it utilizes the privileges of image constitutional depicting, allowing extraction of the most powerful key points since it preserves robustness of co-registration process using image frequency properties which are not variant to illumination. Reasonable results compared to the state of art method as Shi-Tomasi, FAST, and Harris algorithms were achieved on the expense of high computational processing time that can be recovered using hardware having high capabilities.