Template based matching of optical and SAR imagery

Very high resolution radar satellites such as TerraSAR-X open new possibilities for image registration due to their very accurate absolute geo-location. Thus optical and SAR imagery registration seems to be an attractive solution for accurate and automatic common tie points extraction. We propose to use template based image matching approach because it allows defining features/templates using a priori information from the scene/image. The approach works as follows: first quite complex features e.g. roundabouts/junctions are extracted in the optical image, then these features are simulated in SAR and finally they are compared/matched on patch/area basis with the SAR image. The approach is illustrated for very high resolution satellite optical WorldView-2 and radar TerraSAR-X imagery.