Automatic registration of multisensor images with affine deformation based on triangle area representation

A new automatic feature-based registration algorithm of multisensor images with affine deformation is presented. Although the feature-based registration methods have an advantage in reducing computational load over the area-based ones, certain typical issues such as complex deformation and grayscale discrepancy existing in a multisensor image pair will make the design of a robust feature descriptor challenging. To deal with these issues, in contrast with most existing feature-based methods that describe feature points directly, we introduce an additional procedure of feature quadrilateral construction in the proposed algorithm. Then the descriptors for the constructed feature quadrilaterals are designed based on the affine-invariance property of triangle area representation. By doing these, the proposed algorithm's robustness to both affine deformation and grayscale discrepancy can be guaranteed. Besides, since the calculation of feature descriptors only involves simple algebraic operations, the proposed method has low computational load. Experimental results using real multisensor image pairs are presented to show the merits of the proposed method. (C) 2013 SPIE and IS&T. [DOI: 10.1117/1.JEI.22.1.013002]