Automatic registration of SAR and visible band remote sensing images

Image registration is one of the basic image processing operations in remote sensing. With an increasing number of images collected every day from different sensors, automated registration of multi-sensor/multi-spectral images has become an important issue. A wide range of registration techniques exists for different types of applications and data sources, however no algorithm is known that can accurately register multi-source images consistently. This research addresses this problem by investigating the development of a fully automatic registration system for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and optical remote sensing images. The development of this new automatic image registration method is based on the extraction and matching of common features that are visible in both images. The algorithm involves the following five steps: noise removal, edge extraction, edge linking pattern extraction and pattern matching. The application of the developed automatic image registration model to SAR and optical image pairs showed that accurate ground control points (GCPs) could be identified automatically.