An entropy-based image registration method using image intensity difference on overlapped region

Abstract

Image registration is a fundamental procedure in image processing that aligns two or more images of the same scene taken from different times, different viewpoints, or even different sensors. It is reasonable to orientate two images by matching corresponding pixels or regions that are considered identical. Based on this concept, this paper proposes a novel image registration method that applies the information theorem on intensity difference data. An entropy-based objective function is then developed according to the histogram of the intensity difference. The intensity difference represents the absolute gray-level difference of the corresponding pixels between the reference and sensed images over the overlapped region. The proposed registration method is to align the sensed image onto the reference image by minimizing the entropy of the intensity difference through iteratively updating the parameters of the similarity transformation. For performance evaluation, the proposed method is compared with the two exiting registration methods in terms of eight test image sets. The experiment is divided into two scenarios. One is to investigate the sensitivity (i.e., robustness) of the objective functions in these three different methods; the other is to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. Through the experimental results, the proposed method is shown to be very effective in image registration and outperforms the other two methods over the test image sets.