Uav remote sensing image automatic registration based on deep residual features

Abstract

With the rapid development of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology, UAV remote sensing images are increasing sharply. However, due to the limitation of the perspective of UAV remote sensing, the UAV images obtained from different viewpoints of a same scene need to be stitched together for further applications. Therefore, an automatic registration method of UAV remote sensing images based on deep residual features is proposed in this work. It needs no additional training and does not depend on image features, such as points, lines and shapes, or on specific image contents. This registration framework is built as follows: Aimed at the problem that most of traditional registration methods only use low-level features for registration, we adopted deep residual neural network features extracted by an excellent deep neural network, ResNet-50. Then, a tensor product was employed to construct feature description vectors through exacted high-level abstract features. At last, the progressive consistency algorithm (PROSAC) was exploited to remove false matches and fit a geometric transform model so as to enhance registration accuracy. The experimental results for different typical scene images with different resolutions acquired by different UAV image sensors indicate that the improved algorithm can achieve higher registration accuracy than a state-of-the-art deep learning registration algorithm and other popular registration algorithms.