A CNN-Based High-Accuracy Registration for Remote Sensing Images

In this paper, a convolutional neural network-based registration framework is proposed for remote sensing to improve the registration accuracy between two remote-sensed images acquired from different times and viewpoints. The proposed framework consists of four stages. In the first stage, key-points are extracted from two input images—a reference and a sensed image. Then, a patch is constructed at each key-point. The second stage consists of three processes for patch matching—candidate patch pair list generation, one-to-one matched label selection, and geometric distortion compensation. One-to-one matched patch pairs between two images are found, and the exact matching is found by compensating for geometric distortions in the matched patch pairs. A global geometric affine parameter set is computed using the random sample consensus algorithm (RANSAC) algorithm in the third stage. Finally, a registered image is generated after warping the input sensed image using the affine parameter set. The proposed high-accuracy registration framework is evaluated using the KOMPSAT-3 dataset by comparing the conventional frameworks based on machine learning and deep-learning-based frameworks. The proposed framework obtains the least root mean square error value of 34.922 based on all control points and achieves a 68.4% increase in the matching accuracy compared with the conventional registration framework.