A robust multimodal remote sensing image registration method and system using steerable filters with first- and second-order gradients

Co-registration of multimodal remote sensing (RS) images (e.g., optical, infrared, LiDAR, and SAR) is still an ongoing challenge because of nonlinear radiometric differences (NRD) and significant geometric distortions (e.g., scale and rotation changes) between these images. In this paper, a robust matching method based on the Steerable filters is proposed consisting of two critical steps. First, to address severe NRD, a novel structural descriptor named the Steerable Filters of first- and second-Order Channels (SFOC) is constructed, which combines the first- and second-order gradient information by using the steerable filters with a multi-scale strategy to depict more discriminative structure features of images. Then, a fast similarity measure is established called Fast Normalized Cross-Correlation (Fast-NCC_SFOC), which employs the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) technique and the integral image to improve the matching efficiency. Furthermore, to achieve reliable registration performance, a coarse-to-fine multimodal registration system is designed consisting of two pivotal modules. The local coarse registration is first conducted by involving both detection of interest points (IPs) and local geometric correction, which effectively utilizes the prior georeferencing information of RS images to address global geometric distortions. In the fine registration stage, the proposed SFOC is used to resist significant NRD, and to detect control points (CPs) between multimodal images by a template matching scheme. The performance of the proposed matching method has been evaluated with many different kinds of multimodal RS images. The results show its superior matching performance compared with the state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, the designed registration system also outperforms the popular commercial software (e.g., ENVI, ERDAS, and PCI) in both registration accuracy and computational efficiency. Our system is available at https://github.com/yeyuanxin110/SFOC-Multimodal_Remote_Sensing_Image_Registration_System.