Since technologies in image fusion, image splicing, and target recognition have developed rapidly, as the basis of many image applications, the performance of image registration directly affects subsequent work. In this work, for rich features of satellite-borne optical imagery such as panchromatic and multispectral images, the Harris corner algorithm is combined with the scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) operator for feature point extraction. Our rough matching strategy uses the K-D (K-Dimensional) tree combined with the BBF (Best Bin First) method, and the similarity measure is the nearest neighbor/the second-nearest neighbor ratio. Finally, a triangle-area representation (TAR) algorithm is utilized to eliminate false matches in order to ensure registration accuracy. The performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with existing popular algorithms. The experimental results indicate that for visible light and multi-spectral satellite remote sensing images of different sizes and different sources, the proposed algorithm in this work is excellent in accuracy and efficiency.
Keywords: KNN-TAR; image registration; optical remote sensing; point feature; rough matching.