Cross-modal optical--SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) registration is a bottleneck in remote-sensing disaster response. Modern image matchers are developed and benchmarked almost exclusively on natural-image domains. We evaluate twenty-four pretrained matcher configurations in a zero-shot setting, with no fine-tuning or domain adaptation on satellite or SAR data. The evaluation spans SpaceNet9 and two additional cross-modal benchmarks under a deterministic protocol that uses tiled large-image inference, robust geometric filtering, and tie-point-grounded metrics. Our results show uneven transfer: matchers with explicit cross-modal training do not uniformly outperform those without it. XoFTR (trained for visible--thermal matching) and RoMa achieve the lowest reported mean tie-point error at $3.0$ px on the labeled SpaceNet9 training scenes. RoMa achieves this result \emph{without any cross-modal training}. MatchAnything-ELoFTR ($3.4$ px), trained on synthetic cross-modal pairs, is close behind. XoFTR also runs roughly an order of magnitude faster than the RoMa family ($0.4$ s vs. $5.0$ s per pair). RoMa's performance is consistent with the hypothesis that frozen DINOv2 features confer robustness to large appearance shifts. Deployment protocol choices (geometry model, tile size, inlier gating) change mean error by up to $33\times$ for a single matcher. This shift can exceed the effect of swapping matchers within our evaluated protocol ablations. Affine geometry alone reduces mean error from $12.3$ to $9.7$ px.
School of Computer Science（计算机科学学院）；The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）；Nankai University（南开大学）；TuSimple（图森未来）
Matching two images while estimating their relative geometry is a key step in many computer vision applications. For decades, a well-established pipeline, consisting of SIFT, RANSAC, and 8-point algorithm, has been used for this task. Recently, many new approaches were proposed and shown to outperform previous alternatives on standard benchmarks, including the learned features, correspondence pruning algorithms, and robust estimators. However, whether it is beneficial to incorporate them into the classic pipeline is less-investigated. To this end, we are interested in i) evaluating the perform…
KISS-Matcher: Fast and Robust Point Cloud Registration Revisited
Laboratory for Information & Decision Systems (LIDS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology（信息与决策系统实验室，麻省理工学院）；The School of Electrical Engineering, KAIST（电气工程学院，韩国科学技术院）；Dexory, UK（英国Dexory）；Computer Science Engineering and Interdisciplinary Program of AI, Seoul National University（人工智能工程与跨学科项目，首尔国立大学）
Bio-Key International Inc.（Bio-Key国际公司）；Capella University（卡佩拉大学）
A novel minutia-based fingerprint matching algorithm is proposed that employs iterative global alignment on two minutia sets. The matcher considers all possible minutia pairings and iteratively aligns the two sets until the number of minutia pairs does not exceed the maximum number of allowable one-to-one pairings. The optimal alignment parameters are derived analytically via linear least squares. The first alignment establishes a region of overlap between the two minutia sets, which is then (iteratively) refined by each successive alignment. After each alignment, minutia pairs that exhibit we…
This letter proposes a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image registration method named Feature-Area Optimization (FAO). First, the traditional area-based optimization model is reconstructed and decomposed into three key but uncertain factors: initialization, slice set and regularization. Next, structural features are extracted by scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) in dual-resolution space (SIFT-DRS), a novel SIFT-Like method dedicated to FAO. Then, the three key factors are determined based on these features. Finally, solving the factor-determined optimization model can get the registrati…
Multi-Resolution SAR and Optical Remote Sensing Image Registration Methods: A Review, Datasets, and Future Perspectives
School of Remote Sensing and Information Engineering, Wuhan University（武汉大学遥感信息工程学院）；Technology Innovation Center for Collaborative Applications of Natural Resources Data in GBA, Ministry of Natural Resources（自然资源部粤港澳自然资源数据协同应用技术创新中心）
Multi-Expert Learning Framework with the State Space Model for Optical and SAR Image Registration
Key Laboratory of Intelligent Perception and Image Understanding of Ministry of Education of China（教育部智能感知与图像理解重点实验室）；Hangzhou Institute of Technology, Xidian University（西安电子科技大学杭州学院）；School of Computer Science, Xidian University（西安电子科技大学计算机学院）；Department of Automation, Tsinghua University（清华大学自动化系）
TAR: Text Semantic Assisted Cross-modal Image Registration Framework for Optical and SAR Images
Key Laboratory of Intelligent Perception and Image Understanding of Ministry of Education of China, School of Artificial Intelligence, Xidian University（中国教育部智能感知与图像理解重点实验室，西安电子科技大学人工智能学院）；Department of Automation, Tsinghua University（清华大学自动化系）
Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data（深圳大数据研究院）；Tencent America（腾讯美国）
Caricature is an artistic representation that deliberately exaggerates the distinctive features of a human face to convey humor or sarcasm. However, reconstructing a 3D caricature from a 2D caricature image remains a challenging task, mostly due to the lack of data. We propose to fill this gap by introducing 3DCaricShop, the first large-scale 3D caricature dataset that contains 2000 high-quality diversified 3D caricatures manually crafted by professional artists. 3DCaricShop also provides rich annotations including a paired 2D caricature image, camera parameters and 3D facial landmarks. To dem…
Southwest Jiaotong University（西南交通大学）；Tongji University（同济大学）；Beijing Institute of Control and Electronic Technology（北京控制与电子技术研究所）
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 si…
We present OpenGlue: a free open-source framework for image matching, that uses a Graph Neural Network-based matcher inspired by SuperGlue \cite{sarlin20superglue}. We show that including additional geometrical information, such as local feature scale, orientation, and affine geometry, when available (e.g. for SIFT features), significantly improves the performance of the OpenGlue matcher. We study the influence of the various attention mechanisms on accuracy and speed. We also present a simple architectural improvement by combining local descriptors with context-aware descriptors. The code and…
Southwest Jiaotong University（西南交通大学）；University of Trento（特伦托大学）；Purdue University（普渡大学）
Automatic registration of multimodal remote sensing data (e.g., optical, LiDAR, SAR) is a challenging task due to the significant non-linear radiometric differences between these data. To address this problem, this paper proposes a novel feature descriptor named the Histogram of Orientated Phase Congruency (HOPC), which is based on the structural properties of images. Furthermore, a similarity metric named HOPCncc is defined, which uses the normalized correlation coefficient (NCC) of the HOPC descriptors for multimodal registration. In the definition of the proposed similarity metric, we first…
Grid-Reg: Detector-Free Gridized Feature Learning and Matching for Large-Scale SAR-Optical Image Registration
Shanghai Key Laboratory of Intelligent Sensing and Recognition（上海智能感知与识别重点实验室）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Center of Digital Innovation（数字创新中心）
Leveraging Semantic Cues from Foundation Vision Models for Enhanced Local Feature Correspondence
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais（米纳斯吉拉斯联邦大学）；Université de Bourgogne（勃艮第大学）；Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Université de Lorraine（洛林大学）；Microsoft（微软公司）
Southwest Jiaotong University（西南交通大学）；Xinyang Normal University（信阳师范大学）
Over the past few decades, with the rapid development of global aerospace and aerial remote sensing technology, the types of sensors have evolved from the traditional monomodal sensors (e.g., optical sensors) to the new generation of multimodal sensors [e.g., multispectral, hyperspectral, light detection and ranging (LiDAR) and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensors]. These advanced devices can dynamically provide various and abundant multimodal remote sensing images with different spatial, temporal, and spectral resolutions according to different application requirements. Since then, it is of…
Image-to-Point Cloud Registration Made Easy with Rectified Flow-based LiDAR Upsampling
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Toyohashi University of Technology（丰桥技术科学大学计算机科学与工程系）；National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology（国立先进工业科学技术研究所）
The log-ratio (LR) operator has been widely employed to generate the difference image for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image change detection. However, the difference image generated by this pixel-wise operator can be subject to SAR images speckle and unavoidable registration errors between bitemporal SAR images. In this letter, we proposed a spatial metric learning method to obtain a difference image more robust to the speckle by learning a metric from a set of constraint pairs. In the proposed method, spatial context is considered in constructing constraint pairs, each of which consists of…
Southwest Jiaotong University（西南交通大学）；University of Trento（特伦托大学）；Purdue University（普渡大学）；Fondazione Bruno Kessler（布鲁诺·凯斯勒基金会）
While image registration has been studied in remote sensing community for decades, registering multimodal data [e.g., optical, LiDAR, SAR, and map] remains a challenging problem because of significant nonlinear intensity differences between such data. To address this problem, this paper presents a fast and robust matching framework integrating local descriptors for multimodal registration. In the proposed framework, a local descriptor, such as Histogram of Oriented Gradient (HOG), Local Self Similarity (LSS), or Speeded-Up Robust Feature (SURF), is first extracted at each pixel to form a pixel…
OSDM-MReg: Multimodal Image Registration based One Step Diffusion Model
Shanghai Key Laboratory of Intelligent Sensing and Recognition（上海智能感知与识别重点实验室）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Center of Digital Innovation（数字创新中心）
Cross-Modality Feature Fusion Based on Structured State Space Duality for Multimodal Image Registration Network
Remote Sensing Image Processing and Fusion Group, School of Electronic Engineering, Xidian University（遥感图像处理与融合组，电子工程学院，西安电子科技大学）；National Key Laboratory of Radar Signal Processing, Xidian University（雷达信号处理国家级实验室，西安电子科技大学）
SOMA-1M: A Large-Scale SAR-Optical Multi-resolution Alignment Dataset for Multi-Task Remote Sensing
School of Remote Sensing Information Engineering, Wuhan University（遥感信息工程学院，武汉大学）；Hubei LuoJia Laboratory（湖北珞珈实验室）；Technology Innovation Center for Collaborative Applications of Natural Resources Data in GBA, Ministry of Natural Resources（粤港澳大湾区自然资源数据协同应用技术创新中心，自然资源部）
