Iterative Scale-Invariant Feature Transform for Remote Sensing Image Registration

Due to significant geometric distortions and illumination differences, developing techniques for high precision and robust multisource remote sensing image registration poses a great challenge. This article presents an iterative image registration approach, called iterative scale-invariant feature transform (ISIFT) for remote sensing images, which extends the traditional scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT)-based registration system to a close-feedback SIFT system that includes a rectification feedback loop to update rectified parameters in an iterative manner. Its key idea uses consistent feature point sets obtained by maximum similarity to calculate new alignment parameters to rectify the current sensed image and the resulting rectified sensed image is then fed back to update and replace the current sensed image as a new sensed image to reimplement SIFT for next iteration. The same process is repeated iteratively until an automatic stopping rule is satisfied. To evaluate the performance of ISIFT, both the simulated and real images are used for experiments for the validation of ISIFT. In addition, several data sets are particularly designed to conduct a comparative study and analysis with existing state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, experiments with different rotation are also performed to verify the adaptability of ISIFT under different rotation distortions. The experimental results demonstrate that ISIFT improves performance and produces better registration accuracy than traditional SIFT-based methods and existing state-of-the-art methods.