R2FD2: Fast and Robust Matching of Multimodal Remote Sensing Image via Repeatable Feature Detector and Rotation-invariant Feature Descriptor

TL;DR

This paper introduces R2FD2, a novel feature matching method for multimodal remote sensing images that is robust to radiation and rotation differences, combining a repeatable detector and a rotation-invariant descriptor.

Contribution

The paper proposes R2FD2, featuring a new repeatable feature detector (MALG) and a rotation-invariant descriptor (RMLG), improving matching accuracy and efficiency in multimodal remote sensing images.

Findings

Outperforms five state-of-the-art methods in accuracy and efficiency.

Achieves within two pixels matching accuracy.

Demonstrates superior adaptability and universality.

Abstract

Automatically identifying feature correspondences between multimodal images is facing enormous challenges because of the significant differences both in radiation and geometry. To address these problems, we propose a novel feature matching method (named R2FD2) that is robust to radiation and rotation differences. Our R2FD2 is conducted in two critical contributions, consisting of a repeatable feature detector and a rotation-invariant feature descriptor. In the first stage, a repeatable feature detector called the Multi-channel Auto-correlation of the Log-Gabor (MALG) is presented for feature detection, which combines the multi-channel auto-correlation strategy with the Log-Gabor wavelets to detect interest points (IPs) with high repeatability and uniform distribution. In the second stage, a rotation-invariant feature descriptor is constructed, named the Rotation-invariant Maximum index map of the Log-Gabor (RMLG), which consists of two components: fast assignment of dominant orientation and construction of feature representation. In the process of fast assignment of dominant orientation, a Rotation-invariant Maximum Index Map (RMIM) is built to address rotation deformations. Then, the proposed RMLG incorporates the rotation-invariant RMIM with the spatial configuration of DAISY to depict a more discriminative feature representation, which improves RMLG's resistance to radiation and rotation variances.Experimental results show that the proposed R2FD2 outperforms five state-of-the-art feature matching methods, and has superior advantages in adaptability and universality. Moreover, our R2FD2 achieves the accuracy of matching within two pixels and has a great advantage in matching efficiency over other state-of-the-art methods.