An experimental evaluation of non-rigid registration techniques on Quickbird satellite imagery

In remote sensing, because of the wide diversity of image characteristics (size, spatial and radiometric resolution, terrain relief, observation poses, etc.), image registration methods that work well on certain satellite images may not produce acceptable results for others, requiring more powerful techniques. A variety of registration techniques that account for images with non-rigid geometric deformations have been proposed, including piecewise (linear or cubic) functions, weighted mean functions, radial basis functions, B-spline functions, etc. This paper compares three of them: polynomial, piecewise-linear and thin-plate-spline functions, and analyses their performance under a variety of factors: off-nadir viewing, terrain relief, density of control points, and 3D geometric correction. Our comparison applies on panchromatic QuickBird imagery, both ortho-ready (as provided by DigitalGlobe) and orthorectified, acquired on different dates, from different observation attitudes, and sensing different land covers: urban area, high-relief terrain, and a combination of both.