The registration of UAV down-looking aerial images to satellite images with image entropy and edges

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel and efficient image registration algorithm between high resolution satellite images and UAV down-looking aerial images. The algorithm is achieved by a composite deformable template matching. To overcome the limitations of environment changes and different sensors, and to remain image information, we fuse the image edge and entropy features as image representation. According to the altitude information of the UAV, we can get the scales of the down-looking aerial images relative to the satellite images. In the following, we perform an effective search strategy in the satellite images to find the best matching position. Different experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is effective and robust. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.