AN IMPROVED IMAGE REGISTRATION ALGORITHM FOR THERMAL INFRARED AND PANCHROMATIC IMAGE BASED ON GEOMETRIC STRUCTURAL PROPERTIES

Abstract. In order to improve the image registration accuracy of heterogeneous remote sensing images with large radiation differences, an improved image registration algorithm for thermal infrared and panchromatic images is proposed. This method uses the phase consistency of intensity and direction to construct a geometric structure feature descriptor called the Histogram of Oriented Phase Congruency (HOPC) for image registration. It employs the Curvature Scale Space (CSS) corner detection to concentrate and extract feature points in contour areas, and defines a similarity metric (called HOPCn) based on the Euclidean distance between the descriptors for high-precision heterogeneous images registration. Five sets of panchromatic and thermal infrared images were selected for verification. The results show that the improved algorithm can match the homonymy points around the image contour, and the Correct Matching Rate (CMR) is improved by 2.7% and the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) is improved by 3.7% compared to the original algorithm. This proves that the proposed method has good robustness under conditions of large radiation differences.