A mosaic method for multi-temporal data registration by using convolutional neural networks for forestry remote sensing applications

Image registration is one of the most important processes for the generation of remote sensing image mosaics. This paper focuses on the special problems related to remote sensing data registration, and multi-temporal data mosaic applications in the domain of forestry. It proposes an image registration method based on hierarchical convolutional features, and applies it to improve the efficiency of large scale forestry image mosaic generation. This method uses a deep learning architecture to adaptively obtain image features from deep convolutional neural networks. The features derived from different images at different depth are sent to a correlation filter to compute the similarity between them; then the locations of the feature points are computed precisely. Based on this method, we study forestry image registration and the mosaic framework. We apply our approach to remote sensing images under different weather and seasonal conditions, and compare the results with those generated using the traditional SIFT image mosaic method. The experimental result shows that our method can detect and match the image feature points with significant spectral difference, and effectively extract feature points to generate accurate image registration and mosaic results. This demonstrates the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed approach.