Auto-Registration of SAR and Optical Images Based on Priority Strategy

The registration of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and optical images is the critical precondition for image fusion and image analysis, since SAR and optical imaging have complementary effects. However, the traditional algorithms do not often meet the actual demands when a large distortion, the combination of translation, a big rotation and a great scale change, exists between SAR and optical images. This paper presents the factors result in failing registration with a large distortion and devise a novel method based on priority strategy in which rotate and scale are used as priority factor. Experiment results show that the priority strategy proposed registers SAR and optical images with a large distortion automatically and high-precision.