Automatic Matching of Multi-Source Satellite Images: A Case Study on ZY-1-02C and ETM+

The ever-growing number of applications for satellites is being compromised by their poor direct positioning precision. Existing orthoimages, such as enhanced thematic mapper (ETM+) orthoimages, can provide georeferences or improve the geo-referencing accuracy of satellite images, such ZY-1-02C images that have unsatisfactory positioning precision, thus enhancing their processing efficiency and application. In this paper, a feasible image matching approach using multi-source satellite images is proposed on the basis of an experiment carried out with ZY-1-02C Level 1 images and ETM+ orthoimages. The proposed approach overcame differences in rotation angle, scale, and translation between images. The rotation and scale variances were evaluated on the basis of rational polynomial coefficients. The translation vectors were generated after blocking the overall phase correlation. Then, normalized cross-correlation and least-squares matching were applied for matching. Finally, the gross errors of the corresponding points were eliminated by local statistic vectors in a TIN structure. Experimental results showed a matching precision of less than two pixels (root-mean-square error), and comparison results indicated that the proposed method outperforms Scale-Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT), Speeded Up Robust Features (SURF), and Affine-Scale Invariant Feature Transform (A-SIFT) in terms of reliability and efficiency.