High-resolution satellite image registration using local feature and contour fragment

Recently, image registration approaches based on local feature matching have revealed promising results in the fields of natural and medical image processing. However, the performance becomes worse when it is applied to high-resolution satellite image. This arises because the complex nature of this kind of image, which results in a lot of outliers in the initial matches. Therefore, how to select reliable matches from low-precision initial matches becomes very crucial. In this paper, we modify the traditional SIFT descriptor and propose a novel algorithm to identify outliers from initial SIFT matches, which is based on the consistence of local contour fragments between two matched regions. The experimental results show that the presented approach can extract high-precision matches from low-precision initial SIFT matches, and is efficient for high-resolution satellite image registration.