A robust aerial image registration method using Gaussian mixture models

Aerial image registration is one of the bases in many aerospace applications, such as aerial reconnaissance and aerial mapping. In this paper, we propose a novel aerial image registration algorithm which is based on Gaussian mixture models. First of all, considering the characters of the aerial images, the work uses a shape feature detector which computes the boundaries of regions with nearly the same gray-value to extract invariant feature. Then, a Gaussian mixture models (GMM) based image registration model is built and solved to estimate the transformation matrix between two aerial images. Furthermore, the proposed method is applied on real aerial images, and the results demonstrate the improved performance of the proposed algorithm. © 2014 Elsevier B.V.