Fourier-based image correlation is a powerful area-based image registration technique, which involves aligning images based on a translation model or similarity model by means of the image information and operation in the frequency domain. In recent years, Fourier-based image correlation has made significant progress and attracted extensive research interest in a variety of applications, especially in the field of photogrammetry and remote sensing, leading to the development of a number of subpixel methods that have improved the accuracy and robustness. However, to date, a detailed review of the literature related to Fourier-based image correlation is still lacking. In this review, we aim at providing a comprehensive overview of the fundamentals, developments, and applications of image registration with Fourier-based image correlation methods. Specifically, this review introduces the principal laws underlying these methods, presents a survey of the existing subpixel methods calculated both in the spatial domain and in the frequency domain, summarizes the major applications from three aspects, and discusses the challenges and possible directions of future research. This review is expected to be beneficial for researchers working in the relevant fields to obtain an insight into the current state of the art, to develop new variants, to explore potential applications, and to suggest promising future trends of image registration with Fourier-based image correlation.

Hyperspectral image (HSI) clustering is generally a challenging task because of the complex spectral-spatial structure. Based on the assumption that all the pixels are sampled from the union of subspaces, recent works have introduced a robust technique—the sparse subspace clustering (SSC) algorithm and its enhanced versions (SSC models incorporating spatial information)—to cluster HSIs, achieving excellent performances. However, these methods are all based on the linear representation model, which conflicts with the well-known nonlinear structure of HSIs and limits their performance to a large degree. In this paper, to overcome these obstacles, we present a new kernel sparse subspace clustering algorithm with a spatial max pooling operation (KSSC-SMP) for hyperspectral remote sensing data interpretation. The proposed approach maps the feature points into a much higher dimensional kernel space to extend the linear sparse subspace clustering model to nonlinear manifolds, which can better fit the complex nonlinear structure of HSIs. With the help of the kernel sparse representation, a more accurate representation coefficient matrix can be obtained. A spatial max pooling operation is utilized for the representation coefficients to generate more discriminant features by integrating the spatial-contextual information, which is essential for the accurate modeling of HSIs. This paper is an extension of our previous conference paper, and a number of enhancements are put forward. The proposed algorithm was evaluated on two well-known hyperspectral data sets—the Salinas image and the University of Pavia image—and the experimental results clearly indicate that the newly developed KSSC-SMP algorithm can obtain very competitive clustering results for HSIs, outperforming the current state-of-the-art clustering methods.

The Fourier-based image correlation technique has been widely concerned due to its accuracy, efficiency, and robustness to image contrast and brightness. Accordingly, a variety of subpixel methods have been proposed. However, the detailed subpixel-level influence of the complicated radiometric variations has yet to be investigated, and few corresponding improvements have been made. This paper presents a novel illumination-robust subpixel Fourier-based image correlation method based on phase congruency. Both the magnitude and orientation information of the phase congruency features are adopted to construct a structural image representation. The image representation is then embedded into the correlation scheme of the subpixel methods, either by linear phase estimation in the frequency domain or by kernel fitting in the spatial domain, achieving two improved subpixel methods. The proposed methods integrate the advantages of the structural image representation and the original correlation scheme, and make full use of both global and local phase information to achieve illumination-robust correlation. Experiments undertaken with both simulated and real radiometric differences were carried out with ground-truth subpixel shifts. The performances of the proposed methods and the other state-of-the-art subpixel Fourier-based correlation methods were evaluated and compared. The experimental results indicate that the proposed methods outperform the other methods in the presence of diverse radiometric variations, in both accuracy and robustness.

Accurate detection of the multiple classes in aerial images has become possible with the use of anchor-based object detectors. However, anchor-based object detectors place a large number of preset anchors on images and regress the target bounding box while anchor-free object detections predict the location of objects directly and avoid the carefully predefined anchor box parameters. Object detection in aerial images is faced with two main challenges: 1) the scale diversity of the geospatial objects and 2) the cluttered background in complex scenes. In this letter, to address these challenges, we present a novel Anchor-Free Network with a Density map (DM) and attention mechanism (DA2FNet). Considering the extreme density variations of the detection instances among the different categories in aerial images, the proposed DA2FNet model conducts DM estimation with image-level supervision for the geospatial object counting, to acquire global knowledge about the scale information. A simple and effective image-level global counting loss function is also introduced. In addition, a compositional attention network (AN) is further introduced to enhance the saliency of the foreground objects. The proposed DA2FNet method was compared with the state-of-the-art object detection models, achieving excellent performance on the NWPU VHR-10, RSOD, and DOTA datasets.

In this paper, a new joint spectral-spatial subpixel mapping model is proposed for hyperspectral remotely sensed imagery. Conventional approaches generally use an intermediate step based on the derivation of fractional abundance maps obtained after a spectral unmixing process, and thus the rich spectral information contained in the original hyperspectral data set may not be utilized fully. In this paper, a concept of subpixel abundance map, which calculates the abundance fraction of each subpixel to belong to a given class, was introduced. This allows us to directly connect the original (coarser) hyperspectral image with the final subpixel result. Furthermore, the proposed approach incorporates the spectral information contained in the original hyperspectral imagery and the concept of spatial dependence to generate a final subpixel mapping result. The proposed approach has been experimentally evaluated using both synthetic and real hyperspectral images, and the obtained results demonstrate that the method achieves better results when compared to other seven subpixel mapping methods. The numerical comparisons are based on different indexes such as the overall accuracy and the CPU time. Moreover, the obtained results are statistically significant at 95% confidence.

In satellite laser altimetry, it is a challenging task to accurately extract peak positions from full waveforms due to the overlapped or weak peaks within the large laser footprints, which substantially affects the subsequent applications. In this paper, to improve the laser ranging resolution and accuracy, we propose a novel approach by combining deconvolution with Gaussian decomposition. The approach is applied in two main phases: 1) the deconvolution is first used to remove the system contribution (the transmit pulse spreading over several nanoseconds, system noise); and 2) Gaussian decomposition is then adopted to extract the peak parameters of each object. Experiments using simulated and ICESat waveforms were conducted to validate and evaluate the proposed approach by comparing it to the benchmark Gaussian decomposition technique. The results indicated that: 1) the combined approach can significantly improve the peak detection rate: the four combined methods found at least 15.8% more echoes in simulated forested areas; and 2) for ICESat waveforms, the quantitative evaluation and visual assessment of the Blind -Gaussian combination obtained more echoes (on average, approximately 2.5 components) than the other combinations (on average, approximately 1.5 and 1.2 components), and the derived relative object heights were very close to the results obtained from airborne LiDAR data. These results confirmed that the Blind -Gaussian combination is more accurate for the range retrieval of vegetated and urbanized landscapes.