Research on Remote Sensing Image Matching with Special Texture Background
The purpose of image registration is to find the symmetry between the reference image and the image to be registered. In order to improve the registration effect of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) remote sensing imagery with a special texture background, this paper proposes an improved scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) algorithm by combining image color and exposure information based on adaptive quantization strategy (AQCE-SIFT). By using the color and exposure information of the image, this method can enhance the contrast between the textures of the image with a special texture background, which allows easier feature extraction. The algorithm descriptor was constructed through an adaptive quantization strategy, so that remote sensing images with large geometric distortion or affine changes have a higher correct matching rate during registration. The experimental results showed that the AQCE-SIFT algorithm proposed in this paper was more reasonable in the distribution of the extracted feature points compared with the traditional SIFT algorithm. In the case of 0 degree, 30 degree, and 60 degree image geometric distortion, when the remote sensing image had a texture scarcity region, the number of matching points increased by 21.3%, 45.5%, and 28.6%, respectively and the correct matching rate increased by 0%, 6.0%, and 52.4%, respectively. When the remote sensing image had a large number of similar repetitive regions of texture, the number of matching points increased by 30.4%, 30.9%, and −11.1%, respectively and the correct matching rate increased by 1.2%, 0.8%, and 20.8% respectively. When processing remote sensing images with special texture backgrounds, the AQCE-SIFT algorithm also has more advantages than the existing common algorithms such as color SIFT (CSIFT), gradient location and orientation histogram (GLOH), and speeded-up robust features (SURF) in searching for the symmetry of features between images.