Coarse to Fine Image Registration of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Images over Agricultural Area using SURF and Mutual Information Methods

Abstract

In this study, we propose a coarse to fine image registration method for eliminating geometric error between images over agricultural areas acquired using Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). First, images of agricultural area were acquired using UAV, and then orthophotos were generated. In order to reduce the probability of extracting outliers that cause errors during image registration, the region of interest is selected by using the metadata of the generated orthophotos to minimize the search area. The coarse image registration was performed based on the extracted tie-points using the Speeded-Up Robust Features (SURF) method to eliminate geometric error between orthophotos. Subsequently, the fine image registration was performed using tie-points extracted through the Mutual Information (MI) method, which can extract the tie-points effectively even if there is no outstanding spatial properties or structure in the image. To verify the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method, a comparison analysis using 8 orthophotos was performed with the results of image registration using the SURF method and the MI method individually. As a result, we confirmed that the proposed method can effectively eliminated the geometric errors between the orthophotos.