Exploring approaches to layered image registration

Image registration is an important fundamental process, which has many useful applications to Tracking, Automatic Target Recognition (ATR), and Sensor Fusion to name a few. Recent publications illustrate the Air Force's desire to exploit the benefits of a layered (altitude) sensing environment. In such an environment, data from different sensors, of different modalities, at different elevations of the same scene are fused to gain a better understanding of the operational environment. This research, sponsored by the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL), builds on classical registration techniques to explore novel registration algorithms applied to data under the new layered sensing environment. Our main focus, herein, is to register large-scale aerial Electro Optical (EO) images collected from cameras at different altitudes. Particularly we propose a method to jointly segment and register the same object in two layered images. A multiphase, region-based active contour method, together with an adapted joint segmentation-registration technique, are combined to provide a way of registering layered sensing images. This method provides a Level 0 mechanism in data fusion hierarchy to preprocess (segment) and align data for future fusion stages. In this paper, theories of multi-view geometry is reviewed for understanding the possible form of registration, our proposed method is illustrated and substantiating examples and results are provided as well.