Phase correlation (PC), an efficient frequency-domain registration method, has been extensively used in remote sensing images owing to its subpixel accuracy and robustness to image contrast, noise, and occlusions. However, its performance becomes poor when applied to the registration between optical and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images, which are two typical multisensor images. Inspired by the recently proposed feature-based methods, we present a novel subpixel registration method that combines robust feature representations of optical and SAR images and the 3-D PC (OS-PC). The robust feature representations, which capture the inherent property of the two images and retain their structural information, form two dense image cubes. The 3-D PC utilizes the image cubes as a substitute of two raw images to estimate 2-D translations, either by locating peak in the spatial domain or by directly working in the Fourier domain. Furthermore, we investigate two techniques to improve the accuracy of the 3-D PC both in the spatial domain and Fourier domain: the first is the constrained energy minimization method to seek the Dirac delta function after 3-D inverse Fourier transform and the second is the fast sample consensus fitting to estimate phase difference after high-order singular value decomposition of the PC matrix. Experiments with both simulated and satellite optical-to-SAR pairs were carried out to test the proposed method. Compared with state-of-the-art PC methods and optical-to-SAR registration methods, the proposed method presents a superior performance in both accuracy and robustness. Moreover, we verify the adaptability of the proposed method.

As an essential step in 3D reconstruction, stereo matching still faces unignorable problems due to the high resolution and complex structures of remote sensing images. Especially in occluded areas of tall buildings and textureless areas of waters and woods, precise disparity estimation has become a difficult but important task. In this paper, we develop a novel edge-sense bidirectional pyramid stereo matching network to solve the aforementioned problems. The cost volume is constructed from negative to positive disparities since the disparity range in remote sensing images varies greatly and traditional deep learning networks only work well for positive disparities. Then, the occlusion-aware maps based on the forward-backward consistency assumption are applied to reduce the influence of the occluded area. Moreover, we design an edge-sense smoothness loss to improve the performance of textureless areas while maintaining the main structure. The proposed network is compared with two baselines. The experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms two methods, DenseMapNet and PSMNet, in terms of averaged endpoint error (EPE) and the fraction of erroneous pixels (D1), and the improvements in occluded and textureless areas are significant.

Owing to the property of being constant to image contrast and the identification of various types of features, phase congruency (PC) model has been widely used in remote sensing applications. However, when the PC is directly applied to optical and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image registration, it fails to handle large radiometric and geometric differences. In this paper, we propose an automatic algorithm to solve this problem. First, evenly-distributed keypoints are extracted from the optical images via the block harris method. Complementary grid points are selected in image regions with poor structure and texture information. Then a robust similarity metric based on the improved PC model is proposed. Since the two images show diverse properties, we utilize two different PC models, the traditional PC and the SAR-PC. The PC values of several directions are aggregated to construct the feature descriptors on the basis of which, as a result, a similarity metric using the normalized correlation coefficient (NCC) is obtained. We compare the proposed metric with two baselines (mutual information and NCC) and a state-of-the-art method (histogram of the oriented phase congruency, HOPC) in the case of various scenarios, the results show that our method outperforms the baselines and show comparable performance with HOPC in regions with abundant structure information and better performance in untextured regions.

Stereomatching plays an essential role in 3D reconstruction using very-high-resolution (VHR) remote sensing images. However, it still faces unignorable challenges due to the multi-scale objects in large scenes and the multi-modality probability distribution in challenging regions, especially the occluded and textureless areas. Accurate disparity estimation in stereo matching for multi-scale objects has become a hard but crucial task. In this paper, to tackle these problems, we design a novel confidence-aware unimodal cascade and fusion pyramid network for stereo matching. The fused cost volume from the coarsest scale is used to generate the initial disparity map, and then the learnable confidence maps are generated to construct the unimodal cost distributions, which are used to narrow down the next-stage disparity search range. Moreover, we design a cross-scale interaction aggregation module to leverage multi-scale information. Both smooth-L1 loss and stereo focal loss are applied to regularize the disparity map and unimodal cost distribution, respectively. Compared to two state-of-the-art stereo matching networks, extensive experimental results show that our proposed network outperforms them in terms of average endpoint error (EPE) and the fraction of erroneous pixels (D1).