Multi-spectral Satellite Image Registration Using Scale-Restricted SURF

Satellites generally have arrays of sensors having different resolution and wavelength parameters. For some applications, images acquired from different viewpoints and positions are required to be aligned. This alignment process could be achieved by matching the image features followed by image registration. In this paper registration of multispectral satellite images using Speeded Up Robust Features (SURF) method is examined. The performance of SURF for registration of high resolution satellite images captured at different bands is evaluated. Scale restriction (SR) method, which has recently been proposed for SIFT, is adapted to SURF to improve multispectral image registration performance. Matching performance between different bands using SURF, U-SURF, SURF with SR and U-SURF with SR is tested and robustness of these with respect to orientation and scale is evaluated.