Automated image registration for change detection from Landsat Thematic Mapper imagery

Image registration is a critical operation in digital change detection to correct for spatial image-to-image displacement. One challenging problem in this area is the automated registration with higher levels of accuracy. In this paper, the authors explore the basic elements for an automated image registration system based on image segmentation. The technique used region boundaries and strong edges as the matching primitives, and chain-code correlation as the similarity function. A mapping between the two images is formed by interpolation and used to resample the images. The method is automatic and computationally efficient.