An Enhancement to SIFT-Based Techniques for Image Registration

Symmetric-SIFT is a recently proposed local technique used for registering multimodal images. It is based on a well-known general image registration technique named Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT). Symmetric SIFT makes use of the gradient magnitude information at the image’s key regions to build the descriptors. In this paper, we highlight an issue with how the magnitude information is used in this process. This issue may result in similar descriptors being built to represent regions in images that are visually different. To address this issue, we have proposed two new strategies for weighting the descriptors. Our experimental results show that Symmetric-SIFT descriptors built using our proposed strategies can lead to better registration accuracy than descriptors built using the original Symmetric-SIFT technique. The issue highlighted and the two strategies proposed are also applicable to the general SIFT technique.