Image registration method for multimodal images

A new image registration method for multimodal images is proposed in this paper. This method is a combination of the modified scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) feature extraction algorithm and the shape-context feature descriptor. Salient points of multimodal images are extracted by using the modified SIFT feature extraction algorithm. Then each salient point is described by using the shape-context descriptor that formed a feature vector from the orientation histograms of the subregion around each salient point. After salient points matching by using Euclidean distance, random sample consensus algorithm is used to eliminate wrong corresponding pairs. At last, multimodal images registration is achieved by affine transformation and bilinear interpolation. Experimental results for registration of IR images and electro-optical images show that this method has a good registration result.