Abstract:

This paper presents an automatic image registration algorithm based on the contour polygon fitting, which aims to align the infrared and visible images geometrically. Firstly, in order to get the well-defined main contours from the input images—the infrared and visible images, polygon fitting is performed to get rid of the redundant points and noises involved in the contours. Secondly, the polygon vertices along the contours are chosen as feature points, then the contours are diveded into some feature segments. The feature segments along every contour are used as matching primitives to match the contour in order to get the matched vertices. According to the correspondence between the matched vertices in the reference image and those in the sensed image, the trimmed least square method (LSM) is conducted to calculate the registration parameters and eliminate false matching points at the same time. Finally, the infrared and visible images with rigid transformation can be aligned precisely. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed registration algorithm and demonstrate the superiorities of its alignment accuracy and alignment speed.