Registration of Multimodal Remote Sensing Images Using Transfer Optimization

Multimodal image registration is critical yet challenging for remote sensing image processing. Due to the large nonlinear intensity differences between the multimodal images, conventional search algorithms tend to get trapped into local optima when optimizing the transformation parameters by maximizing mutual information (MI). To address this problem, inspired by transfer learning, we propose a novel search algorithm named transfer optimization (TO), which can be applied to any optimizer. In TO, an optimizer transfers its better individuals to the other optimizer in each iteration. Thus, TO can share information between two optimizers and take advantage of their search mechanisms, which is helpful to avoid the local optima. Then, the registration of the multimodal remote sensing images using TO is presented. We compare the proposed algorithm with several state-of-the-art algorithms on real and simulated image pairs. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our algorithm in terms of registration accuracy.