Fine registration between very high resolution satellite images using registration noise distribution

Even after applying an image registration, Very High Resolution (VHR) multi-temporal images acquired from different optical satellite sensors such as IKONOS, QuickBird, and Kompsat-2 show a local misalignment due to dissimilarities in sensor properties and acquisition conditions. As the local misalignment, also referred to as Registration Noise (RN), is likely to have a negative impact on multi-temporal information extraction, detecting and reducing the RN can improve the multi-temporal image processing performance. In this paper, an approach to fine registration between VHR multi-temporal images by considering local distribution of RN is proposed. Since the dominant RN mainly exists along boundaries of objects, we use edge information in high frequency regions to identify it. In order to validate the proposed approach, datasets are built from VHR multi-temporal images acquired by optical satellite sensors. Both qualitative and quantitative assessments confirm the effectiveness of the proposed RN-based fine registration approach compared to the manual registration.