R₂FD₂: Fast and Robust Matching of Multimodal Remote Sensing Images via Repeatable Feature Detector and Rotation-Invariant Feature Descriptor

Identifying feature correspondences between multimodal images is facing enormous challenges because of the significant differences both in radiation and geometry. To address these problems, we propose a novel feature matching method (named R ₂ FD ₂ ) that is robust to radiation and rotation differences, which consists of a repeatable feature detector and a rotation-invariant feature descriptor. In the first stage, a repeatable feature detector called the Multi-channel Auto-correlation of the Log-Gabor (MALG) is presented for feature detection, which combines the multi-channel auto-correlation strategy with the Log-Gabor wavelets to detect interest points (IPs) with high repeatability and uniform distribution. In the second stage, a rotation-invariant feature descriptor is constructed, named the Rotation-invariant Maximum index map of the Log-Gabor (RMLG), which includes fast assignment of dominant orientation and construction of feature representation. In the process of fast assignment of dominant orientation, a Rotation-invariant Maximum Index Map (RMIM) is built to address rotation deformations. Then, the proposed RMLG incorporates the rotation-invariant RMIM with the spatial configuration of DAISY to improve RMLG's resistance to radiation and rotation variances. Finally, we conduct experiments to validate the matching performance of our R ₂ FD ₂ utilizing different types of multimodal image datasets. Experimental results show that the proposed R ₂ FD ₂ outperforms five state-of-the-art feature matching methods. Moreover, our R ₂ FD ₂ achieves the accuracy of matching within two pixels and has a great advantage in matching efficiency over contrastive methods.