A Tiling-Based Strategy for Large-Scale Multisensor Optical-Sar Image Registration

The automatic registration of image pairs composed of optical and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is a highly challenging task because of the inherently different physical, statistical, and textural properties of the input data. Information-theoretic measures capable of comparing local intensity distributions are often used for multisensor optical-SAR registration. Moreover, the growing availability of such heterogeneous data from current space missions require multisensor registration methods able to run on large-scale datasets with acceptable computation times. In this paper, a novel method is proposed combining information-theoretic area-based registration with a sequential image tiling strategy. Experiments with optical-SAR data collected by a variety of sensors (Sentinel, Landsat, ERS, etc.) suggest both qualitatively and quantitatively the effectiveness of the proposed strategy in achieving accurate registration with low computational cost.