Registration of high resolution SAR and optical satellite imagery in urban areas

With the launch of high resolution remote sensing satellites in differentmodalities like TerraSAR-X, WorldView-1 and Ikonos, the contribution of remote sensing for various applications has receiveda tremendous boost. Specifically, the combined analysis of high resolution SAR and optical imagery is of immense importance in monitoringand assessing catastrophes and natural disaster. Although, latest satellites provide georeferenced and orthorectifieddata products, still registration errors exist within images acquired from different sources. These need to be taken care off throughquick automated techniques before the deployment of these data sources for remote sensing applications. Modern satellites likeTerraSAR-X and Ikonos have further widened the existing gap of sensor geometry and radiometry between the two sensors. These satellitesprovide high resolution images generating enormous data volume along with very different image radiometric and geometricproperties (especially in urban areas) leading to failure of multimodal similarity metrics like mutual information to detect thecorrect registration parameters. In this paper we present aprocessing chain to register high resolution SAR and optical imagesby combining feature based techniques namely, homogeneous regions extracted from high resolution images and intensity basedsimilarity metrics namely normalized cross correlation and mutualinformation. Our test dataset consist of images from TerraSAR-X andIkonos acquired over the city of Sichuan, China. First results from registration show good visual alignment of SAR and the opticalimage.     «

With the launch of high resolution remote sensing satellites in differentmodalities like TerraSAR-X, WorldView-1 and Ikonos, the contribution of remote sensing for various applications has receiveda tremendous boost. Specifically, the combined analysis of high resolution SAR and optical imagery is of immense importance in monitoringand assessing catastrophes and natural disaster. Although, latest satellites provide georeferenced and orthorectifieddata products, still registration errors exist wi...     »