Automated Geo-registration for Massive Satellite Image Processing

Massive amount of satellite image processing such asglobal/continental-level analysis and monitoring requires automated and speedy georegistration. There could be two major automated approaches: (1) rigid mathematical modeling using sensor model and ephemeris data; (2) heuristic co-registration approach with respect to existing reference image. In case of ETM+, the accuracy of the first approach is known as RMSE 250m, which is far below requested accuracy level for most of satellite image processing. On the other hands, the second approach is to find identical points between new image and reference image and use heuristic regression model for registration. The latter shows better accuracy but has problems with expensive computation. To improve efficiency of the coregistration approach, the author proposed a pre-qualified matching algorithm which is composed of feature extraction with canny operator and area matching algorithm with correlation coefficient. Throughout the pre-qualification approach, the computation time was significantly improved and make the registration accuracy is improved. A prototype was implemented and tested with the proposed algorithm. The performance test of 14 TM/ETM+ images in the U.S. showed: (1) average RMSE error of the approach was 0.47 dependent upon terrain and features; (2) the number average matching points were over 15,000; (3) the time complexity was 12 min per image with 3.2GHz Intel Pentium 4 and 1G Ram.