SAR and Optical Image Registration Method Based on Improved CycleGAN

It is challenging to register synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and optical images due to large radiometric differences, geometric differences and strong speckle noise. To address this problem, a SAR and optical image registration method based on the improved CycleGAN is presented in this paper. The proposed method is composed of three steps. Firstly, the SAR image is translated into a pseudo-optical image by the improved CycleGAN which is obtained by modifying the generators, the discriminator and the loss function of the original CycleGAN. Secondly, the optical image and the pseudo-optical image are registered by the method suitable for optical image registration to get the affine transformation parameters. Finally, the original SAR image is aligned with the optical image according to these parameters. The results of experiments show that our proposal significantly improves the registration performance of optical and SAR image registration.