Similarity Measurement using Gabor Energy Feature and Mutual Information for Image Registration

Image registration is an essential process to analyze the time series of satellite images for the purpose of image fusion and change detection. The Mutual Information (MI) is commonly used as similarity measure for image registration because of its robustness to noise. Due to the radiometric differences, it is not easy to apply MI to multi-temporal satellite images using directly the pixel intensity. Image features for MI are more abundantly obtained by employing a Gabor filter which varies adaptively with the filter characteristics such as filter size, frequency and orientation for each pixel. In this paper we employed Bidirectional Gabor Filter Energy (BGFE) defined by Gabor filter features and applied the BGFE to similarity measure calculation as an image feature for MI. The experiment results show that the proposed method is more robust than the conventional MI method combined with intensity or gradient magnitude.