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<front>
<journal-meta>
<journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">ISPRS-Archives</journal-id>
<journal-title-group>
<journal-title>The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">ISPRS-Archives</abbrev-journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="nlm-ta">Int. Arch. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci.</abbrev-journal-title>
</journal-title-group>
<issn pub-type="epub">2194-9034</issn>
<publisher><publisher-name>Copernicus Publications</publisher-name>
<publisher-loc>Göttingen, Germany</publisher-loc>
</publisher>
</journal-meta>
<article-meta>
<article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.5194/isprs-archives-XLIX-B2-2026-79-2026</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>ML-MIFD: Multi-Level Multimodal Invariant Feature Descriptor</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Wang</surname>
<given-names>Zening</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Guo</surname>
<given-names>Haoyu</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Yao</surname>
<given-names>Yongxiang</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Zhang</surname>
<given-names>Yongjun</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Wu</surname>
<given-names>Peihao</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Wan</surname>
<given-names>Yi</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>WHU, School of Remote Sensing and Information Engineering, 430079, Wuhan, Hubei, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<pub-date pub-type="epub">
<day>22</day>
<month>07</month>
<year>2026</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>XLIX-B2-2026</volume>
<fpage>79</fpage>
<lpage>85</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Zening Wang et al.</copyright-statement>
<copyright-year>2026</copyright-year>
<license license-type="open-access">
<license-p>This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit <ext-link ext-link-type="uri"  xlink:href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</ext-link></license-p>
</license>
</permissions>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIX-B2-2026/79/2026/isprs-archives-XLIX-B2-2026-79-2026.html">This article is available from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIX-B2-2026/79/2026/isprs-archives-XLIX-B2-2026-79-2026.html</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIX-B2-2026/79/2026/isprs-archives-XLIX-B2-2026-79-2026.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIX-B2-2026/79/2026/isprs-archives-XLIX-B2-2026-79-2026.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>Existing cross-modal feature descriptors are typically limited to single-level local statistics, leading to insufficient structural representation and degraded matching performance under nonlinear radiometric differences and strong noise. To address this limitation, we propose a Multi-Level Multimodal Invariant Feature Descriptor (ML-MIFD). The proposed method introduces a hierarchical descriptor to jointly capture structural information at global, mid-level, and micro-level scales, thereby enhancing robustness in cross-modal representation. First, a modality-invariant feature space is constructed based on phase congruency, where stable keypoints are detected using the FAST operator. Then, a coarse-to-fine hierarchical encoding strategy is employed to integrate multi-scale structural information by cascading three complementary layers: a global contour layer, a mid-level spatial layout layer, and a micro-level texture layer. This multi-level design enables the descriptor to simultaneously preserve global structural consistency and local discriminative details. In addition, a dominant orientation assignment is introduced to ensure rotation invariance, and a feature value truncation strategy is adopted to suppress the influence of local extreme noise. Finally, initial correspondences are established using a bidirectional matching scheme, followed by outlier rejection with the Fast Sample Consensus (FSC) algorithm, resulting in improved matching accuracy and reliability. Extensive experiments on six cross-modal remote sensing scenarios demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in terms of matching success rate, number of correct matches, and matching accuracy, achieving up to 100% matching success rate.</p>
</abstract>
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