Registration of multispectral satellite images with Orientation-Restricted SIFT

In this study, a modified version of the popular SIFT algorithm is introduced. The algorithm is robust to nonlinear intensity changes between images which makes it a strong candidate for multispectral image registration. The proposed Orientation Restricted SIFT algorithm combines the SIFT descriptor vector elements in opposite directions. In this way, better feature matching performance is achieved with shorter descriptor vectors which translate into shorter matching complexity. The effect of scale restriction and contrast stretching is demonstrated on multispectral satellite images and scale restriction is found to be useful in eliminating incorrectly matched features.