Registration of a SPOT image and a SAR image using multiresolution representation of a coastline

A novel method is presented for the registration of a SPOT satellite image against a Seasat synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image. An edge following technique is proposed. It is adapted to very noisy images such as SAR images. It is shown that, by the use of a multiresolution method, a directional graph can be constructed which gives a clearer definition of the equivalence between edge following and optimal path search on a graph. A hypothesis-testing approach, also based on a multiresolution method, is proposed to solve the registration problem. The hypotheses are drawn from scale space representations in order to maintain a low complexity. These hypotheses are then tested by a chamfer distance map. By the combination of scale space representation and the chamfer matching method, a very robust and fast registration results