A novel method for multi-angle SAR image matching

Multi-angle synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image matching is very challenging, because the same object may cause different backscattering patterns, heavily depending on the radar incident angle. A technique based on the relations between the invariant positions of ground targets among the reference and sensed images is proposed to accommodate the nonmatching patterns. It involves a target extraction using wavelet coefficient fusion, as well as a geometric voting matching routine for searching the matched control points (CPs) in the reference and sensed images, respectively. To accelerate the speed of the search, a robust, rapidly corresponding CPs determination strategy is exploited by utilizing the global spatial transformation model, as well as a procedure of outlier removal to ensure the desired accuracy. Meanwhile, the positions of the matched point pairs are relocated using mutual information. The final warping of the images according to the CPs is performed by using a polynomial function. The results show the possibility of matching multi-angle SAR images in general cases.