Graph-Theoretic Registration of 3D Terrain Elevation Data

We present a feature-based registration method using Morse singularities and information theory. The main idea behind our proposed framework is to encode a 3D terrain digital elevation map into a set of Morse critical points. Then an entropic dissimilarity measure between the Morse features of the target and the reference maps is maximized to bring the elevation data into alignment. We also show that maximizing this divergence measure leads to minimizing the total length of the joint minimal spanning tree between features of the misaligned elevation maps. Experimental results are included to show the much improved performance and the georegistration accuracy of the proposed technique