An Integrated Satellite Stereo Image Registration Method Based on KAZE, VFC and TPS Algorithms

Image registration is the technique of aligning two or more images with a reference image all acquired at the same geographical area with different acquisition dates, viewpoints, and imaging sensors. This technique is a fundamental process in photogrammetry and remote sensing tasks, and change detection is known as one of its important applications. Urban change detection with an arbitrary time difference between the two images faces limited access to the required datasets. The Google Earth software is known as an appropriate resource to achieve such datasets. Nevertheless, a significant limitation of this software is the co-registration error of the images acquired at different times. In this work, a combined image registration approach has been proposed to cope with this problem. The proposed method is made up of three major steps. In the first step, the KAZE algorithm is applied to extract and describe image features with high stability against illumination distortions. In the second step, the image matching and mismatch elimination procedures are conducted using the VFC (Vector Field Consensus) technique. Finally, in the third step, the geometric relation between the two images is established using the TPS (Thin-Plate Spline) adaptive transformation model. The results derived from the KAZE feature extraction and matching algorithm are compared with those of the SIFT and SURF algorithms in four satellite image pairs related to various urban areas. For datasets 1 to 4, the highest correct correspondence rates of 0.63, 0.81, 0.6, and 0.76 were obtained using the KAZE algorithm compared to the other algorithms. Moreover, the TPS transformation model established the most accurate and reliable geometric relation between the two images with RMSE values of 2.1, 1.8, 2.1, and 1.7 pixels for datasets 1 to 4, respectively. Accordingly, the results indicate the efficacy of the proposed integrated method for robust feature extraction and image registration of the Google Earth imagery with significant brightness and landscape differences.