SCALE INVARIANT FEATURE MATCHING USING ROTATION-INVARIANT DISTANCE FOR REMOTE SENSING IMAGE REGISTRATION

Abstract

Scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) has been widely used in image matching. But when SIFT is introduced in the registration of remote sensing images, the keypoint pairs which are expected to be matched are often assigned two different value of main orientation owing to the significant difference in the image intensity between remote sensing image pairs, and therefore a lot of incorrect matches of keypoints will appear. This paper presents a method using rotation-invariant distance instead of Euclid distance to match the scale invariant feature vectors associated with the keypoints. In the proposed method, the feature vectors are reorganized into feature matrices, and fast Fourier transform (FFT) is introduced to compute the rotation-invariant distance between the matrices. Much more correct matches are obtained by the proposed method since the rotation-invariant distance is independent of the main orientation of the keypoints. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method improves the match performance compared to other state-of-art methods in terms of correct match rate and aligning accuracy.