A Coarse-to-Fine Matching Algorithm for FLIR and Optical Satellite Image Registration

The registration of a forward-looking infrared (FLIR) image and an optical satellite image (visible image) is challenging but important for image-based navigation systems. To solve this problem effectively, a coarse-to-fine matching algorithm is proposed. First, geometric rectification based on the attitude angles and height parameter is carried out to eliminate the distinct rotation and scale discrepancies between the FLIR and visible images. Then, in the fine registration step, the edges of the visible image and rectified infrared image are extracted, and a robust point set registration algorithm which can deal with the similarity transformation distortion is proposed. Finally, the experiments on both the simulated images and real images show that our algorithm can achieve excellent performance in terms of both robustness and accuracy, and the registration precision of real images can be around one pixel.