A two-stage registration algorithm for oil spill aerial image by invariants-based similarity and improved ICP

Image registration is a crucial progress in detecting oil spilled on the sea and is also important for estimating the volume of the oil spill, especially when one image cannot cover the entire polluted region. In this article, a new algorithm is proposed to register geometrically distorted aerial images of oil spill accurately and automatically. There are two stages in this algorithm: coarse registration and fine registration. Invariants-based similarity and relative space distance are applied to coarse matching. Then improved iterative closest point (ICP) algorithm is used for registering images finely, which is the combination of ICP and a method of solving assignment problem to deal with mismatches. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated by registering oil spill ultraviolet (UV) and infrared (IR) images, respectively. Compared with traditional ICP and other algorithms, the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed algorithm are highly improved.