Robust Feature Matching for Remote Sensing Image Registration via Locally Linear Transforming

Feature matching, which refers to establishing reliable correspondence between two sets of features (particularly point features), is a critical prerequisite in feature-based registration. In this paper, we propose a flexible and general algorithm, which is called locally linear transforming (LLT), for both rigid and nonrigid feature matching of remote sensing images. We start by creating a set of putative correspondences based on the feature similarity and then focus on removing outliers from the putative set and estimating the transformation as well. We formulate this as a maximum-likelihood estimation of a Bayesian model with hidden/latent variables indicating whether matches in the putative set are outliers or inliers. To ensure the well-posedness of the problem, we develop a local geometrical constraint that can preserve local structures among neighboring feature points, and it is also robust to a large number of outliers. The problem is solved by using the expectation-maximization algorithm (EM), and the closed-form solutions of both rigid and nonrigid transformations are derived in the maximization step. In the nonrigid case, we model the transformation between images in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS), and a sparse approximation is applied to the transformation that reduces themethod computation complexity to linearithmic. Extensive experiments on real remote sensing images demonstrate accurate results of LLT, which outperforms current state-of-the-art methods, particularly in the case of severe outliers (even up to 80%).