Automatic Registration of Optical and SAR Images VIA Improved Phase Congruency

Owing to the property of being constant to image contrast and the identification of various types of features, phase congruency (PC) model has been widely used in remote sensing applications. However, when the PC is directly applied to optical and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image registration, it fails to handle large radiometric and geometric differences. In this paper, we propose an automatic algorithm to solve this problem. First, evenly-distributed keypoints are extracted from the optical images via the block harris method. Complementary grid points are selected in image regions with poor structure and texture information. Then a robust similarity metric based on the improved PC model is proposed. Since the two images show diverse properties, we utilize two different PC models, the traditional PC and the SAR-PC. The PC values of several directions are aggregated to construct the feature descriptors on the basis of which, as a result, a similarity metric using the normalized correlation coefficient (NCC) is obtained. We compare the proposed metric with two baselines (mutual information and NCC) and a state-of-the-art method (histogram of the oriented phase congruency, HOPC) in the case of various scenarios, the results show that our method outperforms the baselines and show comparable performance with HOPC in regions with abundant structure information and better performance in untextured regions.