Steps towards a new technique for automated registration of pre- and post-event images

With the continuing increase in the number of images collected every day from different sensors, automated registration of multisensor/multispectral images has become a very important issue. This is especially true when pre- and post-event image comparison is concerned: for this particular application, the requirement of obtaining the earliest possible post-event image imposes the use of data potentially showing strongly different characteristics with respect to the pre-event image. Non-homogeneous image pairs require robust automatic registration techniques. Resolution-independent, feature-based registration is naturally preferred over correlation-based registration but finding correct and sensible feature point sets to be matched is still an open problem today. In this paper we propose to use intersection points of extension off longest linear features found in the images. The fixed points are then matched using a modal matching approach. The procedure is illustrated and results over a set of high-resolution SAR images are presented and discussed.