Spatial-spectral cross correlation for reliable multispectral image registration

This paper presents a normalized spatial-spectral cross correlation method for multispectral image registration. This method generalized correlation coefficients defined in a spatial domain or a spectral domain into a spatial-spectral domain. This novel spatial-spectral signature based method significantly increases the discrimination of the correlation coefficient for a given template window size, increases the registration reliability, robustness and accuracy, as compared with the classic normalized spatial cross correlation method. It is invariant to the dynamic range and robust to the noise yet it is straightforward with minimum preprocessing required. The experimental results show that the normalized spatial-spectral cross correlation method is superior to the traditional normalized spatial cross correlation method in effective registering multispectral images. However, the experimental results also show that only those statistically highly independent spectral bands are helpful for enhancing the robustness and reliability of the NSSCC multispectral image registration. Specifically, it is found that the near infrared band together with visual bands will gives the best registration results.