Registering a MultiSensor Ensemble of Images

Many registration scenarios involve aligning more than just two images. These image sets-called ensembles-are conventionally registered by choosing one image as a template, and every other image is registered to it. This pairwise approach is problematic because results depend on which image is chosen as the template. The issue is particularly acute for multisensor ensembles because different sensors create images with different features. Also, pairwise methods use only a fraction of the available data at a time. In this paper, we propose a maximum-likelihood clustering method that registers all the images in a multisensor ensemble simultaneously. Experiments involving rigid-body and affine transformations show that the clustering method is more robust and accurate than competing pairwise registration methods. Moreover, the clustering results can be used to form a rudimentary segmentation of the image ensemble.