An effective technique for subpixel image registration under noisy conditions

This paper proposes an effective higher order statistics method to address subpixel image registration. Conventional power spectrum-based techniques employ second-order statistics to estimate subpixel translation between two images. They are,. however, susceptible to noise, thereby leading to significant performance deterioration in low signal-to-noise ratio environments or in the presence of cross-correlated channel noise. In view of this, we propose a bispectrum-based approach to alleviate this difficulty. The new method utilizes the characteristics of bispectrum to suppress Gaussian noise. It develops a phase relationship between the image pair and estimates the subpixel translation by solving a set of nonlinear equations. Experimental results show that the proposed technique provides performance improvement over conventional power-spectrum-based methods under different noise levels and conditions.