Improved Automatic Registration Adjustment of Multi-source Remote Sensing Datasets

Registration techniques are still considered challenging tasks to remote sensing users, especially after enormous increase in the volume of remotely sensed data being acquired by an ever-growing number of earth observation sensors. This surge in use mandates the development of accurate and robust registration procedures that can handle these data with varying geometric and radiometric properties. This paper aims to develop the traditional registration scenarios to reduce discrepancies between registered datasets in two dimensions (2D) space for remote sensing images. This is achieved by designing a computer program written in Visual Basic language following two main stages: The first stage is a traditional registration process by defining a set of control point pairs using manual selection, then comput the parameters of global affine transformation model to match them and resample the images. The second stage included matching process refinement by determining the shift value in control points (CPs) location depending on radiometric similarity measure. Then shift map technique was adjusted to adjust the process using 2nd order polynomial transformation function. This function has chosen after conducting statistical analyses, comparing between the common transformation functions (similarity, affine, projection and 2nd order polynomial). The results showed that the developed approach reduced the root mean square error (RMSE) of registration process and decreasing the discrepancies between registered datasets with 60%, 57% and 48% respectively for each one of the three tested datasets.