Comparative evaluation of signal-based and descriptor-based similarity measures for SAR-optical image matching

This paper compares different similarity measures for the matching of very-high-resolution SAR and optical images over urban areas. It is meant to provide guidance about the performance of both signal-based and descriptor-based similarity measures in the context of this non-trivial case of multi-sensor correspondence matching. Using an automatically generated training dataset, thresholds for the distinction between correct matches and wrong matches are determined. It is shown that descriptor-based similarity measures outperform signal-based similarity measures significantly.