Multimodal Remote Sensing Image Registration Algorithm Based on a New Edge Descriptor

Abstract

Image registration of multimodal remote sensing images plays a vital role in remote sensing image analysis. However, there are significant nonlinear intensity differences between multimodal remote sensing image pairs, making it difficult for most traditional image registration algorithms to meet the registration requirements. In this paper, we propose a novel edge descriptor utilizing edge information, which has not only affine invariance but is also insensitive to nonlinear intensity differences. Moreover, we utilize the proposed descriptor to design a multimodal image registration algorithm. We use several different multimodal image pairs to evaluate the proposed algorithm. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm holds a stable performance and can still achieve accurate spatial alignment even with the huge nonlinear intensity differences.