TOPS model image registration study in topographic undulating areas

Abstract

The characteristics of sentinel data using terrain observation by progressive scans (TOPS) determine that its registration process is more complex and requires higher accuracy, and the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images obtained from areas with large terrain undulations have obvious shadows and overlay masks. In this paper, we investigate the difficult problem of SAR image registration in TOPS imaging mode in areas with large terrain undulations and design a multi-stage registration method based on geometric registration, incoherent cross correlation (ICC) method, and enhanced spectral diversity (ESD) to complete the registration of sentinel image pairs and compare the accuracy of the traditional cross-correlation method with that of this paper. The experiments prove that the method described in this paper has the advantage that the registration accuracy does not depend on the image coherence, and it can still maintain a high accuracy even in areas with large topographic relief.