A HYBRID AND HIERARCHICAL APPROACH TO AERIAL IMAGE REGISTRATION

Abstract

This paper proposes a hybrid approach to image registration for inferring the affine transformation that best matches a pair of partially overlapping aerial images. The image registration is formulated as a two-stage hybrid approach combining both phase correlation method (PCME) and optical flow equation (OFE) based estimation algorithm in a coarse-to-fine manner. With PCME applied at the highest level of decomposition, the initial affine parameter model could be first estimated. Subsequently, the OFE-based estimation algorithm is incorporated into the proposed hybrid approach using a multi-resolution mechanism. PCME is characterized by its insensitivity to large geometric transform between images, which can effectively guide the OFE-based registration. For image pairs under salient brightness variations, we propose a nonlinear image representation that emphasizes common intensity information, suppresses the non-common information between an image pair, and is suitable for the proposed coarse-to-fine hierarchical iterative processing. Experimental results demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of our proposed approach using different types of aerial images.