A registration-noise driven technique for the alignment of VHR remote sensing images

In this paper a novel method for registration of multitemporal very high geometrical resolution (VHR) remote sensing images is presented. It relies on the extraction of a large set of control points (CPs) used for the estimation of a disparity map exploited for the registration process. CPs are automatically identified in both the images through the estimation and analysis of the distribution of registration noise (RN) and used together with an interpolation procedure in the definition of the disparity map. This map contains for each pixel the estimated value of the displacement between the reference and the moving image. The warping of the moving image is performed according to the disparity map by using thin plate spline interpolation. Results obtained on simulated and real VHR data confirm the validity of the proposed technique, which is effective both in identifying CPs and in performing the image alignment.