Investigation and evaluation of algorithms for unmanned aerial vehicle multispectral image registration

•Automatically registration of UAV multispectral images is an urgent need.•Five registration methods are evaluated on 1200 groups of UAV multispectral images.•DSIM outperforms CFOG and SIFT in images with weak or repeated texture.•The multi-method ensemble strategy outperforms the individual methods with a correct matching rate of 96.2%.