Experimental Evaluation of Rigid Registration Using Phase Correlation Under Illumination Changes

The phase correlation method is a computationally-efficient technique for image alignment. Presently, the method is capable of performing rigid image registration with sub-pixel accuracy, and is fairly robust to noise and long translations. However, there are also cases when the images to be aligned were taken at different times or come from different sensors, and may present differences in intensity values or illumination. Many algorithms exist to deal with these issues; however, most of them are computationally expensive. In this article, we explore the robustness of the phase correlation method to illumination and/or intensity changes by means of a quantitative evaluation using artificially-generated rigid transformations. Our results suggest that rigid registration using phase correlation may be fairly robust to gamma correction, quantization and multi-spectral acquisition, but more sensitive to differences in illumination and lighting conditions between the input images.