Registration of vector data and aerial thermal images using modified mutual information

The topic of registering multi- and hyperspectral imagery is well studied in literature. However when the registration must be done between multispectral images and vector data, the literature is more limited. In this paper we focus on registering aerial images in the thermal (IR) band, and vector data delineating houses and other man-made structures in the same region. This differs from classical registration because first of all, the vector data is not in the same format as the thermal image (i.e. vectors versus pixels), although it can be rasterized initially. Secondly, feature points fail to match between the two representations while intensity based methods also have problems due to the large changes between the rasterized vector and thermal images. We present a method based on a modified version of mutual information that outperforms existing methods for these specific inputs.