Structure-driven SAR image registration

We present a fully automatic method for the alignment SAR images, which is capable of precise and robust alignment. A multiresolution SAR image matching metric is first used to automatically determine tie-points, which are then used to perform coarse-to-fine resolution image alignment. A formalism is developed for the automatic determination of tie-point regions that contain sufficiently distinctive structure to provide strong constraints on alignment. The coarse-to-fine procedure for the refinement of the alignment estimate both improves computational efficiency and yields robust and consistent image alignment.