Uniform Robust Scale-Invariant Feature Matching for Optical Remote Sensing Images

Extracting well-distributed, reliable, and precisely aligned point pairs for accurate image registration is a difficult task, particularly for multisource remote sensing images that have significant illumination, rotation, and scene differences. The scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) approach, as a well-known feature-based image matching algorithm, has been successfully applied in a number of automatic registration of remote sensing images. Regardless of its distinctiveness and robustness, the SIFT algorithm suffers from some problems in the quality, quantity, and distribution of extracted features particularly in multisource remote sensing imageries. In this paper, an improved SIFT algorithm is introduced that is fully automated and applicable to various kinds of optical remote sensing images, even with those that are five times the difference in scale. The main key of the proposed approach is a selection strategy of SIFT features in the full distribution of location and scale where the feature qualities are quarantined based on the stability and distinctiveness constraints. Then, the extracted features are introduced to an initial cross-matching process followed by a consistency check in the projective transformation model. Comprehensive evaluation of efficiency, distribution quality, and positional accuracy of the extracted point pairs proves the capabilities of the proposed matching algorithm on a variety of optical remote sensing images.