An Improved L2Net for Repetitive Texture Image Registration with Intensity Difference Heterogeneous SAR Images

• Published in: Remote Sensing
• Main Authors: Peng Men, Hao Guo, Jubai An, Guanyu Li
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2022
• Subjects: image registration; heterogeneous SAR imagery; deep learning network; feature match; Science; Q; Sea ice
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.3390/rs14112527; https://doaj.org/article/3716f55507844e27a052ca0a16f5c074

Heterogeneous synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images contain more complementary information compared with homologous SAR images; thus, the comprehensive utilization of heterogeneous SAR images could potentially improve performance for the monitoring of sea surface objects, such as sea ice and enteromorpha. Image registration is key to the application of monitoring sea surface objects. Heterogeneous SAR images have intensity differences and resolution differences, and after the uniform resolution, intensity differences are one of the most important factors affecting the image registration accuracy. In addition, sea surface objects have numerous repetitive and confusing features for feature extraction, which also limits the image registration accuracy. In this paper, we propose an improved L2Net network for image registration with intensity differences and repetitive texture features, using sea ice as the research object. The deep learning network can capture feature correlations between image patch pairs, and can obtain the correct matching from a large number of features with repetitive texture. In the SAR image pair, four patches of different sizes centered on the corner points are proposed as inputs. Thus, local features and more global features are fused to obtain excellent structural features, to distinguish between different repetitive textural features, add contextual information, further improve the feature correlation, and improve the accuracy of image registration. An outlier removal strategy is proposed to remove false matches due to repetitive textures. Finally, the effectiveness of our method was verified by comparative experiments.