Mutual Information-based Circular Template Matching for Image Registration

This paper presents a method for designing circular template used in similarity measurement for image registration. Circular template has translation and rotation invariant property, which results in correct matching of control points for image registration under the condition of translation and rotation between reference and sensed images. Circular template consisting of the pixels located on the multiple circumferences of the circles whose radii vary from zero to a certain distance, is converted to two-dimensional Discrete Polar Coordinate Matrix (DPCM), whose elements are the pixels of the circular template. For sensed image, the same type of circular template and DPCM are created by rotating the circular template repeatedly by a certain degree in the range between 0 and 360 degrees and then similarity is calculated using mutual information of the two DPCMs. The best match is determined when the mutual information for each rotation angle at each pixel in search area is maximum. The proposed algorithm was tested using KOMPSAT-2 images acquired at two different times and the results indicate high accurate matching performance under image rotation.