Automatic Registration of Satellite Images

In remote sensing applications, the traditional procedure for registering a pair of images requires the manual selection of ground control points at significant landmarks of the images. The primary drawback of this approach is that a trained expert is needed to manually select each individual ground control point in the remotely sensed images. This is very laborious and time consuming. In this paper, a new feature-based approach to automate image-to-image registration is proposed for remote sensing applications. This new approach exploits the nonsubsampled contourlet transform to automatically extract a set of control points across spatial and directional resolutions where misalignment between images can be expected to appear. Preliminary experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed algorithm.