Robust feature matching via Gaussian field criterion for remote sensing image registration

Feature matching, which refers to establishing reliable feature correspondences between two images of the same scene, is a critical prerequisite in a wide range of remote sensing tasks including environment monitoring, multispectral image fusion, image mosaic, change detection, map updating. In this paper, we propose a method for robust feature matching and apply it to the problem of remote sensing image registration. We start by creating a set of putative feature matches which can contain a number of unknown false matches, and then focus on mismatch removal. This is formulated as a robust regression problem, and we customize a robust estimator, namely the Gaussian field criterion, to solve it. The robust criterion can handle both linear and nonlinear image transformations. In the linear case, we use a general homography to model the transformation, while in the nonlinear case, the non-rigid functions located in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space are considered, and a regularization term is added to the objective function to ensure its well-posedness. Moreover, we apply a sparse approximation to the non-rigid transformation and reduce the computational complexity from cubic to linear. Extensive experiments on various natural and remote sensing images show the effectiveness of our approach, which is able to yield superior results compared to other state-of-the-art methods.