An automatic method on detecting image control points from SAR imagery based on Optical Image Patches

In this paper, we propose a novel procedure of detecting control points from SAR image based on Optical Image Patches procedure. The method presented here is a three-step procedure. In the first stage, a local image patch from the SAR image is estimated from the geo-information of the SAR image and the GCP geo-coordinate, and the local patch is performed an affine transformation by using the four geo-coordinates of the SAR image in advance. In the second stage, the NCC procedure is performed on the GCP and the preprocessed local SAR image patch to find the candidate image control point(ICP). In the third stage, the pairs of ICP and GCP are refined, and the false pairs are discarded by the RANSAC algorithm. Experiments on SAR-Optical satellite images demonstrate the reliability and effectiveness of the presented method.