Automatic registration of satellite imagery

Image registration is one of the basic image processing operations in remote sensing. With the increase in the number of images collected every day from different sensors, automated registration of multi-sensor/multi-spectral images has become an important issue. A wide range of registration techniques has been developed for many different types of applications and data. The objective of this paper is to present an automatic registration algorithm which uses a multiresolution analysis procedure based upon the wavelet transform. The procedure is completely automatic and relies on the grey level information content of the images and their local wavelet transform modulus maxima. The registration algorithm is very simple and easy to apply because it needs basically one parameter. We have obtained very encouraging results on test data sets from the TM and SPOT sensor images of forest, urban and agricultural areas.