Remote Sensing Image Registration With Modified SIFT and Enhanced Feature Matching

The scale-invariant feature transform algorithm and its many variants are widely used in feature-based remote sensing image registration. However, it may be difficult to find enough correct correspondences for remote image pairs in some cases that exhibit a significant difference in intensity mapping. In this letter, a new gradient definition is introduced to overcome the difference of image intensity between the remote image pairs. Then, an enhanced feature matching method by combining the position, scale, and orientation of each keypoint is introduced to increase the number of correct correspondences. The proposed algorithm is tested on multispectral and multisensor remote sensing images. The experimental results show that the proposed method improves the matching performance compared with several state-of-the-art methods in terms of the number of correct correspondences and aligning accuracy.