A Modified Local Binary Pattern Descriptor for SAR Image Matching

Image matching is an important step which is taken in most applications of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. In this letter, a method is proposed for SAR image matching which introduces a modified local binary pattern (LBP) as a descriptor. Multitextural feature LBP (MTF-LBP) uses the gray-level cooccurrence matrix to increase image texture information. MTF-LBP creates bit plane for each point candidate for matching. Then, using hamming distance, true matches are determined. Experiments are conducted on four spaceborne SAR image pairs including Radarsat-2, TerraSAR-X, ALOS-PALSAR, and Sentinel-1. The proposed method is compared with five common LBP approaches. The results indicate that the proposed method has a better performance in terms of the number of true matches.