Automatic registration of high resolution satellite images using local properties of tie points 1)

In this paper, we propose the automatic image-to-image registration of high resolution satellite images using local properties of tie points to improve the registration accuracy. A spatial distance between interest points of reference and sensed images extracted by Scale Invariant Feature Transform(SIFT) is additionally used to extract tie points. Coefficients of affine transform between images are extracted by invariant descriptor based matching, and interest points of sensed image are transformed to the reference coordinate system using these coefficients. The spatial distance between interest points of sensed image which have been transformed to the reference coordinates and interest points of reference image is calculated for secondary matching. The piecewise linear function is applied to the matched tie points for automatic registration of high resolution images. The proposed method can extract spatially well-distributed tie points compared with SIFT based method.