ROBUST MULTIMODAL IMAGE MATCHING BASED ON MAIN STRUCTURE FEATURE REPRESENTATION

Abstract. Image matching is a crucial procedure for multimodal remote sensing image processing. However, the performance of conventional methods is often degraded in matching multimodal images due to significant nonlinear intensity differences. To address this problem, this letter proposes a novel image feature representation named Main Structure with Histogram of Orientated Phase Congruency (M-HOPC). M-HOPC is able to precisely capture similar structure properties between multimodal images by reinforcing the main structure information for the construction of the phase congruency feature description. Specifically, each pixel of an image is assigned an independent weight for feature descriptor according to the main structure such as large contours and edges. Then M-HOPC is integrated as the similarity measure for correspondence detection by a template matching scheme. Three pairs of multimodal images including optical, LiDAR, and SAR data have been used to evaluate the proposed method. The results show that M-HOPC is robust to nonlinear intensity differences and achieves the superior matching performance compared with other state-of-the-art methods.