Automatic registration of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images

The huge amount of incoming synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data nowadays demands the need for automatic image registration. Due the presence of speckle noise and the huge size of SAR images, registering SAR images is more difficult than traditional image registration methods. In this paper we present an automatic hierarchical registration method, based on polar block matching, that can handle the registration of SAR images efficiently. Results show us that our proposed registration method outperforms the manual registration and that our method is very robust against speckle noise. An additional advantage of our registration method is that there is no need for a despeckling preprocessing step