Registration of metric resolution SAR and Optical images in urban areas

Earth observing sensors are of different kinds, providing complementary or different observations. Among the Earth Observation sensors, optical and radar ones deliver images with unlike physical properties. Thus it is interesting to fuse such images in order to benefit from both data. Such a demarch begins with the registration of input images. This paper is dedicated to automatic registration of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and optical images at metric resolution in urban areas. Our appproach is divided into two main steps. First, a rigid deformation is computed, using the Fourier-Mellin invariant method applied on features extracted in both images. Second, this first transform estimation is refined by a polynomial deformation based on pre-selected pixels grid.