Improving Co-registration for Sentinel-1 SAR and Sentinel-2 Optical images

Co-registering the Sentinel-1 SAR and Sentinel-2 optical data of European Space Agency (ESA) is of great importance for many remote sensing applications. However, we find that there are evident misregistration shifts between the Sentinel-1 SAR and Sentinel-2 optical images that are directly downloaded from the official website. To address that, this paper presents a fast and effective registration method for the two types of images. In the proposed method, a block-based scheme is first designed to extract evenly distributed interest points. Then the correspondences are detected by using the similarity of structural features between the SAR and optical images, where the three dimension (3D) phase correlation (PC) is used as the similarity measure for accelerating image matching. Finally, the obtained correspondences are employed to measure the misregistration shifts between the images. Moreover, to eliminate the misregistration, we use some representative geometric transformation models such as polynomial models, projective models, and rational function models for the co-registration of the two types of images, and compare and analyze their registration accuracy under different numbers of control points and different terrains. Six pairs of the Sentinel-1 SAR L1 and Sentinel-2 optical L1C images covering three different terrains are tested in our experiments. Experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve precise correspondences between the images, and the 3rd. Order polynomial achieves the most satisfactory registration results. Its registration accuracy of the flat areas is less than 1.0 10m pixels, and that of the hilly areas is about 1.5 10m pixels, and that of the mountainous areas is between 1.7 and 2.3 10m pixels, which significantly improves the co-registration accuracy of the Sentinel-1 SAR and Sentinel-2 optical images.