Full-Frame Image Registration By Address Modification

The essential problem of scene-matching is that of the differences that may exist between the two pictures that are to be matched. These are classified as differences in intensity, structure, and geometry. Preprocessing operations to extract invariants, such as edges or higher level features are required to deal with differences in intensity and structure. However, even when the pictures have been processed in this way to eliminate or minimize intensity and structural differences, the pictures may still exhibit substantial differences (of scale, rotation, aspect, etc) if they were taken from two different camera positions and directions. In this paper it is shown how such geometrical differences can be dealt with by means of a frame-warping technique called Address Modification. The required frame warp (for a coplanar scene) is completely defined in all cases by eight parameters. These eight parameters can be derived by a serial processing operation performed on the two pictures. The parameters can then be applied to one of the pictures to bring them into exact area registration with each other over the full picture frame.