Automatic SAR Image Registration via Tsallis Entropy and Iterative Search Process

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image registration is a process of geometrically aligning two or more remote sensing images, acquired at different times, from different viewpoints or from different sensors. To solve the problem that determines which transformation provides the most accurate match between two images, we propose a novel Tsallis entropy-based approach combined with a sequential search strategy to significantly reduce the computational complexity compared to the existing methods, while retaining excellent SAR registration performance. The Tsallis entropy can be considered as a kind of general version of similarity metric, depending on the order of Tsallis entropy. Thus, we use Tsallis entropy as a cost function to measure the degree of the focus of an average intensity projection profile of SAR image. The global optimum of the similarity metric should be reached if the reference and sensed images are correctly registered. The proposed method consists of coarse and fine registration steps, and each step is divided into two parts: range and azimuth domain processing. From the experimental results, we verify that the proposed method outperforms conventional methods in terms of computational complexity of the algorithm owing to the sensitivity of the cost function and efficiency of sequential search strategy.