Optical-to-SAR image registration using the active contour model

An elastic contour matching method for the registration of the optical images with synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is proposed. Using the contours from the optical image as the initial condition, accurate contour locations in the SAR image are obtained by applying an active contour model (Snake). The centroids of the closed contours and the salient points along the open contours are used as control points, through which the transformation parameters between the images can be estimated. The proposed algorithm has outperformed manual registration in terms of root mean square error at the control points.<>