Universal SAR and optical image registration via a novel SIFT framework based on nonlinear diffusion and a polar spatial-frequency descriptor

Abstract Due to severe speckle noise in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images and the large nonlinear intensity differences between SAR and optical images, the registration of SAR and optical images is a challenging problem that remains to be solved. In this paper, an improved nonlinear scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT)-framework-based algorithm that combines spatial feature detection with local frequency-domain description for the registration of SAR and optical images is proposed. First, multiscale representations of the SAR and optical images are constructed based on nonlinear diffusion to better preserve edges and obtain consistent edge information. The ratio of exponentially weighted averages (ROEWA) operator and the Sobel operator are utilized in the process of scale space construction to calculate consistent gradient information. Then, a new feature detection strategy based on the Harris–Laplace ROEWA and Harris–Laplace Sobel techniques is proposed to detect stable and repeatable keypoints in the scale space. Finally, a novel descriptor, called the rotation-invariant amplitudes of log-Gabor orientation histograms (RI-ALGH), and a simplified version, ALGH, are proposed. The proposed descriptors are built based on the amplitudes of multiscale and multiorientation log-Gabor responses and utilize an improved spatial structure of the gradient location and orientation histogram (GLOH) descriptor, which is robust to local distortions. The experimental results on both simulated and real images demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve better results than other state-of-the-art methods in terms of registration accuracy.