SAR Image Registration Based on Feature Points Using Improved CSP-DenseNet

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image registration is widely used in integrated navigation system with development of guidance system in sensors and other applications. However, there exists some difficulty because of the quality and imaginary principle of SAR images. In this article, a brand-new method based on feature points using improved CSP-DenseNet is proposed to solve the problems of SAR image registration with weak and noisy texture. Deep features of interest points in SAR images are extracted using the proposed network from the crops of search image and template image respectively. The method has an advantage of preserving abundant feature information in SAR images under the influence of insufficient image information and noise of SAR images. The CSP-DenseNet architecture has a cross-stage construction optimizing fused by CSP-Net and DenseNet to extract matching features. The network is partially connected in specific convolutional layers for feature reusing and computation resources saving. Then, Brute Force Matcher and RANSAC voting are successively applied for a larger number of matching pairs and high-precise matching vertexes. Experimental results on various SAR image matching methods show that the proposed method provides better performance than other approaches compared.