A new affine invariant feature extraction method for SAR image registration

To cope with the problem of automatic registration of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images, a novel affine invariant feature extraction method is proposed. The proposed method adapts the salient image disks (SIDs) extraction method to accurately localize affine invariant features in SAR images. The contributions mainly include three aspects. First, a multi-scale isotropic matched filter (MIMF) operator is modified to detect salient features. Then, a multi-resolution search strategy is adopted for eliminating unstable features, and affine invariance is achieved by an affine adaptation process. Finally, a point-set registration method based on Coherent Point Drift (CPD) is applied to the SAR image registration problem. Experiment results show that the proposed method has great improvement compared with the original method.