An Image Registration Method Using Deep Residual Network Features for Multisource High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images

Accurate registration for multisource high-resolution remote sensing images is an essential step for various remote sensing applications. Due to the complexity of the feature and texture information of high-resolution remote sensing images, especially for images covering earthquake disasters, feature-based image registration methods need a more helpful feature descriptor to improve the accuracy. However, traditional image registration methods that only use local features at low levels have difficulty representing the features of the matching points. To improve the accuracy of matching features for multisource high-resolution remote sensing images, an image registration method based on a deep residual network (ResNet) and scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) was proposed. It used the fusion of SIFT features and ResNet features on the basis of the traditional algorithm to achieve image registration. The proposed method consists of two parts: model construction and training and image registration using a combination of SIFT and ResNet34 features. First, a registration sample set constructed from high-resolution satellite remote sensing images was used to fine-tune the network to obtain the ResNet model. Then, for the image to be registered, the Shi_Tomas algorithm and the combination of SIFT and ResNet features were used for feature extraction to complete the image registration. Considering the difference in image sizes and scenes, five pairs of images were used to conduct experiments to verify the effectiveness of the method in different practical applications. The experimental results showed that the proposed method can achieve higher accuracies and more tie points than traditional feature-based methods.