Self-Calibrating Dense Displacement Fields for Reliable Co-Registration of Large Optical Satellite Imagery

Co-registration underlies nearly every multi-temporal and multi-sensor use of optical satellite imagery, and operational products still carry documented offsets well above the fraction-of-a-pixel scale at which change detection, time series, and data fusion degrade. Real image pairs differ along several axes at once (sensor response, scene content, viewing geometry, resolution, mosaic seams), and the last of these is not a single global motion. Existing tools embed a motion model and constants tuned to their development data; a pair that fits is registered precisely, while one that does not either fails to match or returns a result wrong by tens of pixels with no failure reported. Learned matchers add a GPU requirement and carry no accuracy guarantee outside their training distribution. We present SCDF (self-calibrating displacement fields), a training-free, GPU-free estimator whose motion model is the dense per-pixel displacement field itself, so no scene motion falls outside the model. A single predict--measure--filter loop runs over a resolution pyramid: the accumulated field predicts where each patch of the moving image falls in the reference, RootSIFT matching and a correlation pass measure the displacement there to sub-pixel precision, and filters whose thresholds are all calibrated on the image pair itself decide what survives. One configuration, with no per-dataset tuning, processes full 81922 scenes on a single CPU core. On 584 constructed-ground-truth pairs built from real Sentinel-2, Landsat-8/9, and NAIP imagery, against seven classical baselines and two zero-shot pretrained matchers, SCDF registers every pair with zero failures, reduces the best baseline's real-pair median end-point error from 6.83 to 4.17m, and cuts its 90th percentile from 17.8 to 7.77m.