IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING, VOL. 53, NO.
10, OCTOBER 2015
Remote Sensing Image Matching Based on
Adaptive Binning SIFT Descriptor
Amin Sedaghat and Hamid Ebadi
Abstract—Image matching based on local invariant features is
crucial for many photogrammetric and remote sensing applica-
tions such as image registration and image mosaicking. In this
paper, a novel local feature descriptor named adaptive binning
scale-invariant feature transform (AB-SIFT) for fully automatic
remote sensing image matching that is robust to local geometric
distortions is proposed. The main idea of the proposed method is
an adaptive binning strategy to compute the local feature descrip-
tor. The proposed descriptor is computed on a normalized region
defined by an improved version of the prominent Hessian affine
feature extraction algorithm called the uniform robust Hessian
affine algorithm. Unlike common distribution-based descriptors,
the proposed descriptor uses an adaptive histogram quantization
strategy for both location and gradient orientations, which is
robust and actually resistant to a local viewpoint distortion and
extremely increases the discriminability and robustness of the
final AB-SIFT descriptor. In addition to the SIFT descriptor, the
proposed adaptive quantization strategy can be easily extended
for other distribution-based descriptors. Experimental results on
both synthetic and real image pairs show that the proposed
AB-SIFT matching method is more robust and accurate than
state-of-the-art methods, including the SIFT, DAISY, the gradi-
ent location and orientation histogram, the local intensity order
pattern, and the binary robust invariant scale keypoint.
Index Terms—Adaptive binning scale-invariant feature trans-
form (AB-SIFT), image matching, local feature descriptor, uni-
form robust Hessian affine (URHA).
I. I NTRODUCTION
I MAGE matching is defined as the establishment of cor-
respondences between two or more images of the same
scene. It is a fundamental process that is widely used in various
remote sensing applications such as image registration [1]–[6],
change detection [7], [8], 3-D reconstruction, and mapping
sciences [9]–[14]. Nowadays, most image matching algorithms
are based on local invariant features because of their robustness
to geometric and illumination differences [15].
Manuscript received October 15, 2014; revised February 19, 2015; accepted
March 31, 2015. Date of publication April 27, 2015; date of current version
June 10, 2015.
A. Sedaghat is with the Department of Geomatics, Faculty of Geodesy and
Geomatics Engineering, Khajeh Nasir Toosi University of Technology, Tehran
19697 64499, Iran (e-mail: am.sedaghat@gmail.com).
H. Ebadi is with the Department of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing
and the Center of Excellence for Geospatial Information Technology, Faculty
of Geodesy and Geomatics Engineering, Khajeh Nasir Toosi University of
Technology, Tehran 19697 64499, Iran (e-mail: ebadi@kntu.ac.ir).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TGRS.2015.2420659
0196-2892 © 2015 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
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5283
Generally, local-feature-based image matching methods con-
sist of three main steps as follows.
1) Feature detection: Distinctive image features are selected
from images (a reference image and an input image), such
as corners, blobs, and regions.
2) Feature description: Various image properties such as
gray-level gradients, texture, and edges are used to provide
robust representations of the extracted local features to
characterize and match them.
3) Feature matching: The correspondence of the extracted
features from two images is established using particular
similarity measures.
This paper focuses on the feature description step. A descrip-
tor is computed on a local region around a feature point and
is used to characterize and compare the features. Generally,
a good descriptor should have two main properties, including
distinctiveness (different features should have different descrip-
tors) and robustness (a descriptor’s stability to a variety of
image geometric and photometric transformations). Improv-
ing distinctiveness while maintaining robustness is the main
concern in the design of local image descriptors [16]. Local
descriptors in literature can be generally divided into three cat-
egories, i.e., distribution-based, spatial-frequency-techniques-
based, and differential-based descriptors [17], [18]. Many of
the proposed descriptors are distribution based, which use
histograms to represent different characteristics of appearance
or shape. For this purpose, the local feature region is divided
into different areas and computes a specific histogram for each
area. The final descriptor is given by the ordered concatenation
of these histograms.
The most popular distribution-based local descriptor is the
scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) [19], which is a 3-D
histogram of gradient location and orientation on Cartesian
4 × 4 grids. The SIFT descriptor is highly discriminant, and
various similar local descriptors are developed based on its
characteristics since its first introduction, such as the gradient
location and orientation histogram (GLOH) [17], the irregular-
grid SIFT (IG-SIFT) [20], the partial intensity-invariant feature
descriptor (PIIFD) [21], the speeded-up robust feature (SURF)
[22], the center-symmetric local binary pattern (CS-LBP) [23],
and DAISY [24]. In the GLOH, instead of Cartesian 4 × 4
grids, a log-polar location grid with 17 location bins is used
as the descriptor structure. In the IG-SIFT, an irregular grid
structure is used by considering the overlap areas between the
descriptor bins. The PIIFD uses gradient orientation modifi-
cation in the descriptor computation process that limits the
 5284 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING, VOL. 53, NO. 10, OCTOBER 2015
gradient orientation between 0 and π. The SURF descriptor is
a SIFT-like descriptor that uses Haar wavelet responses. The
CS-LBP descriptor combines the strengths of the SIFT and a
variant of the local binary pattern. The DAISY descriptor uses
circular cells of varying sizes arranged concentrically, which
is very efficient to compute densely. Recently, various de-
scriptors have been proposed based on intensity orders, which
are inherently rotation invariant, such as the local intensity
order pattern (LIOP) [25], multisupport region order-based
gradient histogram (MROGH), the multisupport region rotation
and intensity monotonic invariant descriptor (MRRID) [16],
the resistant to affine transformation and monotonic intensity
change (RATMIC) descriptor [26], and robust differential circle
patterns (RDCP) [27]. Some recent works have focused on
providing methods to compute binary descriptors by comparing
the intensities of pairs of points. Some examples are the binary
robust independent elementary features (BRIEFs) [28], the
binary robust invariant scale keypoints (BRISKs) [29], the fast
retina keypoints (FREAKs) [30], and the ordinal and spatial
information of regional invariants (OSRI) [31].
Local invariant features have received a lot of attention in
the remote sensing community [32]–[35]. Many remote sensing
image matching and registration approaches have been devel-
oped using local invariant features. For example, in a previous
study, we proposed a fully automated matching algorithm based
on an improved SIFT algorithm, which is called the uniform
robust SIFT (UR-SIFT) [32]. Moreover, in another research,
we introduced a method for the image matching of satellite
data based on quadrilateral control networks, which is based on
the SIFT algorithm and a piecewise model [33]. Cai et al. [36]
proposed a perspective SIFT that uses homographic transfor-
mation to simulate a perspective distortion. Zhang et al. [37]
proposed a coarse-to-fine large-size very-high-resolution im-
age registration method based on the SIFT and the oriented
function analysis system technique [38] and rotated BRIEF
[39] (ORB) algorithm, which uses a computed unified device
architecture to speed up the acquisition of control points and
image rectification. Goncalves et al. [40] proposed a method
for automatic image registration based on the combination of
image segmentation and the SIFT complemented by a robust
procedure of outlier removal.
The majority of the pervious works use the original SIFT
detector and descriptor algorithm, which often suffer from
some problems in quality, quantity, the distribution of extracted
features, and descriptor sensitivity against significant intensity
and geometric differences, particularly in multisource remote
sensing imagery [32], [41].
One of the most important properties of the local features
is locality [42]. To reduce the probability of occlusion and to
allow simple model approximations of geometric and photo-
metric deformations, the features should be local. On the other
hand, the more local a feature, the less information content,
which may result in a large number of mismatches in the
matching process.
The existing distribution-based local descriptors use a con-
stant or regular histogram binning process in both the location
and the orientation. In fact, the location and the orientation are
quantized into individual bins in the descriptor structure. For
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example, in the SIFT descriptor, the location is quantized into
a 4 × 4 location grid, and the gradient angle is quantized into
eight orientations.
Remote sensing images can observe a scene from different
viewpoints, generating images with significant local geometric
distortions. For two conjugate local regions in two different
images, the amount of these distortions increases with the dis-
tance from the centers of the features. Generally, the descriptors
use a Gaussian weighting function to give less emphasis to
pixels that are far from the center of the descriptor as these
are most affected by local distortion errors [19]. Despite the
good impact of the Gaussian weighting process in improving
descriptor robustness against a local distortion, it cannot appro-
priately handle this problem, and it will reduce the descriptor
distinctiveness.
This paper presents an effective method to increase the
discriminative ability of distribution-based descriptors by using
an adaptive binning strategy. In the proposed descriptor, the
location quantization process is progressively incremented in
an adaptive manner. In addition, to appropriately modulate
the impact of the pixels’ distance, different orientation his-
tograms with variable sizes are used for each location bin. This
novel strategy effectively increases the descriptor performance
against local distortions. We use this strategy for the SIFT
descriptor and proposed the adaptive binning SIFT (AB-SIFT)
descriptor; however, it can be easily used for other local de-
scriptors.
Based on the proposed AB-SIFT descriptor, we further de-
velop a remote sensing image matching method by integrating
with an advanced extension of the Hessian affine feature ex-
traction algorithm. The AB-SIFT is compared with the SIFT,
DAISY, the LIOP, and the BRIEF in the synthetic, multitempo-
ral, and multisensor remote sensing image matching. Results
show that the AB-SIFT descriptor is highly distinctive and
robust against geometric and radiometric distortions.
II. P ROPOSED AB-SIFT D ESCRIPTOR
The main idea of the proposed method is an adaptive binning
strategy to compute the feature descriptor. Instead of assigning
constant location and orientation histogram binning in the
descriptor computation process, the local regions are adaptively
partitioned into several location and orientation bins with dif-
ferent sizes. The proposed descriptor computation consists of
the following steps: 1) uniform robust Hessian affine (URHA)
feature extraction; 2) affine normalization and orientation as-
signment; and 3) descriptor computation based on adaptive
gradient histogram binning. Details of the proposed method are
presented in the following sections.
A. URHA Feature Extraction
Viewpoint and scale changes are the most difficult types
of geometric transformation, which strongly affect the local
feature performance in the feature matching process. Various
methods for local invariant feature extraction have been pro-
posed, in which the Hessian affine feature detector [43] is one of
the most prominent methods for this purpose and is particularly
 SEDAGHAT AND EBADI: REMOTE SENSING IMAGE MATCHING BASED ON AB-SIFT DESCRIPTOR
Fig. 1. Local feature extraction. (a) QuickBird subimage (0.6 m) with a size of 555 × 584. (b) Standard Hessian affine result. (c) URHA result.
designed to deal with significant scale and viewpoint changes
in computer vision applications.
To increase the Hessian affine detector capability in remote
sensing images, in this paper, an advanced strategy is used for
effective, robust, reliable, and uniformly distributed elliptical
Hessian affine feature extraction according to our previous
research on the UR-SIFT algorithm [32]. The main idea of
this approach is a selection strategy of the features in the full
distribution of the location and the scale where the feature qual-
ities are quarantined based on the stability and distinctiveness
constraints [32].
This strategy is adapted for the Hessian affine algorithm, and
the URHA algorithm is proposed. The contrast (the Laplacian
scale response), entropy, and scale of each candidate Hessian
affine feature are considered for feature quality evaluation, and
multilevel gridding is used for location distribution. The outline
of the URHA feature extraction algorithm is as follows.
1) The initial Hessian affine features are extracted using a
scale-space representation with the Hessian function and
a second moment matrix.
2) The information entropy of each extracted initial feature
is computed. The entropy and Laplacian scale response of
each feature are considered feature quality constraints.
3) Each layer in the scale space is divided into regular cells,
and the required features in each grid cell are extracted
based on the entropy and contrast constraints.
For a detailed explanation of this method, see [32].
Fig. 1 shows the feature extraction results by the standard
Hessian affine algorithm and the proposed URHA algorithm
for a sample QuickBird image. The comparison shows the high
capability of the URHA algorithm in robust and uniform scale
and spatial distribution feature extraction.
B. Affine Normalization and Orientation Assignment
To obtain geometric invariance, particularly scale and affine
differences, the detected region should be normalized to a
canonical region. For this purpose, after Hessian affine feature
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5285
extraction, all the regions are resampled to a circular region of
constant radius (a 41 × 41 patch) [17]. In order to achieve orien-
tation invariance, before descriptor generation, one orientation
is assigned to each feature point based on local image gradient
directions based on Lowe’s method [19]. Then, the normalized
regions are rotated in the direction of the dominant gradient
orientation.
C. AB-SIFT Descriptor Computation
In this section, a new histogram binning strategy is presented
for distinctive distribution-based feature description in remote
sensing image matching. Before presenting the proposed de-
scriptor, a brief review of the most common histogram binning
methods and their weaknesses is expressed.
In distribution-based descriptors such as the SIFT descriptor,
the local feature region is divided into different subregions
(location bins), and a specific histogram is generated for each
subregion. The final descriptor is generated by the ordered con-
catenation of these histograms. Generally, uniform portioning
is used for the descriptor structure, and a constant bin size is
applied for histogram generation.
Various descriptor structures have been proposed in liter-
ature. Some of the most common structures are shown in
Fig. 2(a)–(c). In the original SIFT descriptor, the location is
quantized into a 4 × 4 location grid, and the gradient angle is
quantized into eight orientations [see Fig. 2(a)]. The descriptor
dimension is 128. In the GLOH, a log-polar location grid
with 3 bins in the radial direction and 8 bins in the angular
direction (17 location bins) is used [see Fig. 2(b)]. The gradient
orientations are quantized in 16 bins; therefore, the descriptor
has a dimension of 272, which is reduced to 128 with the
principal component analysis. The DAISY descriptor uses a
circular grid, including 25 location bins and 8 bins for gradient
orientations; therefore, the descriptor has a dimension of 200
[see Fig. 2(c)].
The SIFT descriptor and its improved extensions are com-
monly used for remote sensing image matching due to their
invariance geometric and radiometric distortions. The remote
 5286 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING, VOL. 53, NO. 10, OCTOBER 2015
Fig. 2. SIFT-like descriptor structure. (a) Original SIFT. (b) GLOH. (c) DAISY. (d) Proposed AB-SIFT descriptor. The gradient orientation histogram of each
descriptor is shown in a sample location bin. It should be noted that, in the proposed AB-SIFT descriptor, three different gradient orientation histograms are used.
sensing images of the same 3-D scenes, particularly high-
resolution wide-baseline images, have different appearances
with significant local geometric distortions if they are obtained
from different viewpoints. It is clear that, for two correspon-
dence local regions in two different images, the amount of
these distortions increases with the distance from the centers
of the features. However, SIFT-based descriptors use a regular
histogram binning process in both the location and orienta-
tion quantization processes. The regular binning provides an
identical effect for various location bins, which lie in different
positions in the local region. For example, in the standard
SIFT algorithm, both farther and closer cells have a gradient
histogram with eight components. Generally, a simple Gaussian
weighting function is applied to give less emphasis to pixels
that are far from the center of the local descriptor. Despite the
positive impact of the Gaussian weighting process in improving
descriptor robustness against local distortions, it can reduce the
descriptor distinctiveness and may not be enough to determine
the correct matching.
On the other hand, in descriptors with a log-polar structure,
the inner circular region is not divided into radial sectors [see
Fig. 2(b)]. This process decreases the descriptor distinctiveness
since some spatial information is lost [16]. However, when
regular binning is applied, the internal location bin in the first
ring becomes too small, and the descriptor will be very sensitive
to the pixel location errors. Moreover, the descriptor dimension
significantly increases.
In order to address these problems, in this paper, a novel
adaptive strategy is proposed for distinctive descriptor con-
struction. By employing the adaptive quantization strategy to
local region dividing and gradient histogram computation, the
distinctiveness and capability of the descriptor are significantly
increased compared with existing SIFT-like descriptors, as
shown by the experiments in the next section. This process
effectively divides the local region into various location bins
with an appropriate size. To avoid pixel location errors and
to increase the descriptor distinctiveness, the smaller angular
quantization numbers are used for inner circles compared with
outer circles in the descriptor structure. In addition, instead
of using a single gradient histogram as existing local descrip-
tors, multiple gradient histograms of different sizes are used
depending on the distance from the center of the local feature.
Because the amount of the geometric distortions increases with
the distance from the centers of the features, smaller orientation
histograms are considered for location bins, which are far from
the center of the descriptor. Using this process, the location
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bins with smaller geometric distortions have larger impacts in
the descriptor structure. As a result, the distinctiveness and
robustness of the descriptor are significantly increased.
The proposed AB-SIFT descriptor is an advanced extension
of the SIFT descriptor and is computed in an adaptive binning
manner to increase its distinctiveness. The AB-SIFT descriptor
structure is based on a circular log-polar grid with variable
bins instead of the SIFT’s regular grid. First, the normalized
local region R is separated into n (a radial quantization num-
ber) nonoverlapping circular rings, i.e., R(1), R(2), . . . , R(n),
centered on the local feature point. In order to give a more
distinctive description, instead of regular portioning, we use
an adaptive strategy to perform the angular division. For this
purpose, set M = {m1 , . . . , mn } is applied as angular quanti-
zation numbers. Each ring R(i) is divided into mi subregions
(location bins), which are equally distributed along the mi
directions, defining a sub-region R(i, j) with i = {1, . . . , n},
and for each i, j = {1, . . . , mi }.
After subregion division, the gradient orientation histograms
based on weighted gradient magnitudes should be computed for
each subregion. Different from other distribution-based meth-
ods that choose a constant bin number for histogram generation
in each location bin, in the proposed descriptor, a variable bin
size for a gradient orientation histogram is used. In a similar
location binning process, set K = {k1 , . . . , kn } is applied as
histogram quantization numbers. For each subregion R(i, j), its
orientation histogram H(i, j) is computed in the ki quantized
orientation. This process effectively represents the local region
by assigning smaller orientation histograms for outer location
bins to give less emphasis to pixels that are far from the center
of the descriptor.
By combining the values of all the gradient histogram entries
from all the subregions into a single vector, the AB-SIFT
descriptor D of local region R can be defined as follows:
D = {H(1, 1), . . . , H(i, j), . . . , H(n, mn )}
i = {1, . . . , n} j = {1, . . . , mi } ∀ i (1)
where n is the radial quantization number, mi is the angular
quantization number of the ith ring, and H(i, j) is the orienta-
tion histogram of subregion R(i, j). Therefore, the dimension
of the proposed descriptor, i.e., d, is computed as follows:

n
d= mi · ki (2)
i=1
 SEDAGHAT AND EBADI: REMOTE SENSING IMAGE MATCHING BASED ON AB-SIFT DESCRIPTOR
TABLE I
PARAMETERS OF THE AB-SIFT D ESCRIPTOR
where ki is the histogram quantization number of the ith ring.
In summary, the parameters that control the structure of the
proposed descriptor are listed in Table I. We will discuss how
they should be chosen in Section III.
Fig. 2(d) provides an illustration of the proposed AB-
SIFT descriptor structure for n = 3, M = {5, 8, 10}, and K =
{8, 6, 4}, in which the gradient orientation histogram of each
ring is shown in a sample location bin.
The process of the proposed AB-SIFT descriptor generation
is illustrated in Fig. 3. The AB-SIFT descriptor is computed on
a normalized region defined by the improved URHA feature de-
tector [see Fig. 3(a)]. First, the region gradient magnitudes and
orientations are computed (see Fig. 3(b) and (c), respectively).
To increase the descriptor robustness against local distortions,
we also use a Gaussian weighting function similar to the SIFT
descriptor [see Fig. 3(d)]. In addition, to avoid all boundary
effects, for each pixel, a weight value inversely related to the
distances (i.e., as the distance increases, the weight decreases)
between the pixel location and the location bin center is used
[see Fig. 3(e)]. The distance weight value, i.e., wd (p), for each
pixel sample p(xp , yp ), which lies in location bin R(i, j), can
be computed as
1 projective transformation model for simulation. Fig. 4 shows an
wd (p) =  (3)
(xp − xc (i, j))2 + (yp − yc (i, j))2
where xc (i, j) and yc (i, j) are the coordinate values of the
center of location bin R(i, j), with pixel sample p(xp , yp )
lying in it. Fig. 4(a) visualizes the distance weight value, i.e.,
wd . In Fig. 3(f), the product of the two weight values (the
Gaussian weight and the distance weight) is indicated. Based
on the AB-SIFT structure, each pixel belonging to the local
region contributes to the descriptor depending on its location
and orientation in the local region [see Fig. 3(g)]. Then, the
descriptor vector is generated by the ordered concatenation of
the values of all the orientation histogram entries corresponding
to the lengths of the arrows in Fig. 3(g) [see Fig. 3(h)]. Finally,
the descriptor vector is normalized to unit length to reduce the
effects of illumination change.
The main invariance property of the proposed descriptor is
its robustness against the local distortion of the features in the
multitemporal and multimodal remote sensing images acquired
from different viewpoints.
D. Feature Correspondence
The feature correspondence between the extracted features
is done through the nearest neighbor distance ratio (NNDR)
approach [17] as a matching strategy. In this matching strategy,
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5287
the thresholding is applied to the Euclidean distance ratio
between the first and second nearest neighbors. The features
are matched if the distance ratio between the first and second
nearest neighbors is smaller than TED = 0.9. To increase the
matching reliability, a cross-matching constraint is also applied
[44]. The cross-matching process is a dual strategy that con-
firms the matching by a reverse certification. For this purpose,
the NNDR matching is performed in forward and backward
processes. The features are considered as final matches if the
results of the forward and backward processes are consistent.
III. E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS
In this section, the performance of the proposed algorithm
is evaluated with different types of remote sensing images. To
examine the effectiveness of the proposed AB-SIFT descriptor,
it is also compared with five other local descriptors, i.e., the
standard SIFT, DAISY, GLOH, LIOP, and BRISK descriptors.
In the following, image data sets, evaluation criteria, and exper-
imental results are presented.
A. Data Set
Two categories of remote sensing image pairs are used to
evaluate the proposed descriptor, i.e., the simulated interband
images of the same sensor and the multitemporal and multi-
sensor real images. The image pairs of the first category are
simulated by applying various known geometric transforma-
tions to two different bands of a satellite image. Because the
main property of the proposed method is its robustness against
local distortions, we use a viewpoint distortion based on the
example of the generated simulated images for various view-
point angles in a satellite image pair. In the second category,
six data sets comprising different types of multitemporal and
multisensor satellite imagery have been used to evaluate the
performance of the proposed image matching algorithm. The
input image description is shown in Table II. The selected im-
age pairs cover a variety of low-, medium-, and high-resolution
remote sensing images with a ground sample distance from 0.5
to 15 m. All real images were acquired from different view-
points and contained the local geometric distortion. Moreover,
significant illumination differences are available, particularly in
multisensor images.
B. Evaluation Criteria and Implementation Detail
In order to evaluate the proposed method, two common
criteria, i.e., recall and precision [17], are used, which are
defined as recall = CM/C and precision = CM/(CM+FM),
respectively, where the correct match (CM) is the number
of correctly matched point pairs in the matching results, the
false match (FM) is the number of falsely matched point pairs
in the matching results, and the correspondence (C) is the
total number of existing match point pairs in the initial match
point sets.
Two different strategies are applied for computing the num-
ber of CMs and C on the simulated and real image pairs.
 5288 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING, VOL. 53, NO. 10, OCTOBER 2015

Fig. 3. Process of the proposed AB-SIFT descriptor generation. (a) Normalized URHA’s local region. (b) Gradient magnitude. (c) Gradient orientation.
(d) Gaussian weighting function. (e) Weight value based on the inverse distance in each location bin. (f) Sum of the two weight functions. (g) Descriptor
computation. (h) Descriptor vector generation and normalization.

Fig. 4. Example of simulated image generation for a viewpoint geometric distortion. (a) and b) ETM+ image pair in bands 1 and 6, respectively. (c)–(e) Simulated
images for 30◦ , 50◦ , and 70◦ viewpoint angles, respectively.

TABLE II
I NPUT I MAGE PAIRS

Because in the simulated images the geometric transformation In real image pairs, the spatial relationship between two
between two images is known, the quality of the matching result images is established by a 2-D projective transformation. A
can be easily estimated. skilled operator manually selects tie points with distinctive

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 SEDAGHAT AND EBADI: REMOTE SENSING IMAGE MATCHING BASED ON AB-SIFT DESCRIPTOR 5289

texture. For each image pair, 40–60 evenly distributed points are TABLE III
AVERAGE P ERFORMANCE OF THE P ROPOSED D ESCRIPTORS
determined. Then, an accurate projective transformation model W ITH D IFFERENT PARAMETER S ETTINGS
is computed using manually selected tie points. Therefore, the
manually computed projective model is used to determine the
number of CMs and correspondences. A location uncertainty
is necessary for this purpose, in which a distance threshold of
2 pixels is used in this paper. In addition, the root-mean-square
error (RMSE) of the CM point pairs is used as the positional
accuracy of the matching algorithm for input image pairs.
We compared the results of the proposed method with five
different descriptors, i.e., the SIFT, DAISY, GLOH, LIOP, and
BRISK descriptors. In our experiments, the SIFT and LIOP
descriptors are implemented based on the VLFeat toolbox
[45], whereas the GLOH, DAISY, and BRISK descriptors are
implemented based on their publicly available code with the
authors’ help [17], [46], [47]. For all the methods, we used the
default parameters supplied by the authors.
The proposed image matching algorithm was implemented
in MATLAB. The input parameters of the proposed method, as
aforementioned in the previous section, are selected as follows.
The URHA algorithm is implemented based on the VLFeat
toolbox [45] and the presented parameters in [32]. In our
experiments, the local region size after normalization is fixed
to 41 × 41 pixels.
There are three key parameters in the proposed AB-SIFT de-
scriptor, i.e., radial quantization number n, angular quantization
set M , and histogram quantization set K, which are evaluated
to test their influence. Various values and combinations of the {8, 6, 4}, which are considered default values for the proposed
input parameters can be used for descriptor generation. For AB-SIFT descriptor.
evaluation, the values of n, M , and K are selected from sets {2,
3, 4}, {2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12}, and {4, 6, 8, 10}, respectively. In
C. Results and Discussion
order to avoid high dimensionality, the parameters are chosen
in such a way that the final descriptor dimension become from The proposed URHA feature extraction algorithm is used
120 to 144 components. Here, only 20 different combinations to extract the features from all test image pairs. Then, the
of the parameters are shown for evaluation. For this purpose, we proposed AB-SIFT descriptor is used for feature description
conducted image matching experiments on 30 pairs of remote and matching. In order to evaluate the proposed matching
sensing images with different parameter settings, as listed in approaches, comparisons with the SIFT, DAISY, GLOH, LIOP,
Table III. These 30 image pairs are selected from various and BRISK descriptors are carried out. It should be noted that
multitemporal and multisensor satellite images, such as ETM+, a similar matching strategy based on the NNDR and cross
Satellite Pour l’Observation de la Terre (SPOT) 4, SPOT 5, matching are used to establish feature correspondence and to
Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Ra- compute the recall and precision values for all methods.
diometer (ASTER), Indian Remote Sensing (IRS), SPOT 6, To evaluate the capability of the proposed method for image
QuickBird, GeoEye, and WorldView sensors, which contained matching against various viewpoint distortions, two sets of
different geometric (scale, rotation, viewpoint) and illumination simulated multiband images are used in this paper. Fig. 5 shows
distortions. the comparative results of the six descriptors on the first set of
Table III depicts the results. The average recall and the aver- simulated image pairs with different viewpoint angles in terms
age precision are used to show the matching performance. The of the recall, the precision, the number of CMs, and the RMSE.
results indicate that n = 2 is poor at discriminating. However, it The images are from the ETM+ sensor in bands 1 and 6, and
can be observed that there are no significant differences in the they have significant illumination differences that complicate
discriminative power at different settings for n = 3 and n = the matching process. The results depicted in Fig. 5 show that
4, and they give approximately similar responses. Generally, the proposed descriptor outperforms the other techniques in all
a greater orientation histogram for internal circle rings and synthetic viewpoint distortions and for all evaluation criteria.
greater spatial binning for outer circle rings provide better The similar results are obtained for the second data set
matching results. However, orientation histograms greater than from the WorldView sensor, which are illustrated in Fig. 6.
eight (ki > 8) do not improve the matching results and can even These results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed
hurt the results. In addition, the internal circle ring division adaptive quantization strategy for viewpoint-invariant remote
greater than six (m1 > 6) does not enhance the results. The sensing image matching. As can be seen in Figs. 6 and 7,
best results are obtained for n = 3, M = {5, 8, 10}, and K = the performance of the proposed descriptor and that of the

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 5290 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING, VOL. 53, NO. 10, OCTOBER 2015

Fig. 5. Experimental results on the first image pair of the simulated category. (a) Recall. (b) Precision. (c) Number of CMs. (d) RMSE.

Fig. 6. Experimental results on the second image pair of the simulated category. (a) Recall. (b) Precision. (c) Number of CMs. (d) RMSE.

Fig. 7. Matching results for the simulated images. (a) First image pair: ETM+ (band 1)–simulated ETM+ (band 6, with a viewpoint of 60◦ ). (b) WorldView
(band 1)–simulated WorldView (band 8, with a viewpoint of 60◦ ).

other descriptors significantly degrade with the severity of the
viewpoint transformation. The main reason for this drawback
is the detector limitation. Viewpoint changes are the most
difficult type of transformation to cope with [48]. By increasing
the viewpoint distortion, significant geometric differences are
created in each image pair, and the detector cannot reliably
extract the repeatable features.
The matching results of the proposed method for two sample
simulated image pairs of the first and second data sets are
presented in Fig. 7 as examples. For a better representation,
the correspondence elliptical features have the same color. The
matching results in this figure show the capability of the
proposed method in finding numerous accurate and well-
distributed match features in images with significant geometric
and radiometric distortions.
To comprehensively evaluate the proposed method in a
real situation, the experiments are also performed on various
multitemporal and multisensor images. Clearly, the descriptor
performance in various image pairs directly depends on the
available geometric and radiometric distortions between each
image pair. As a result, multisensor image matching is typically
more difficult than multitemporal image matching due to the
considerable geometric differences and differing intensity map-
pings of the remotely sensed images acquired using different
modalities and frequencies.
Fig. 8 shows the comparative results of the six descriptors on
all eight real test image pairs in terms of the recall, the preci-
sion, the number of CMs, and the RMSE. It can be observed that
the proposed AB-SIFT descriptor significantly outperformed
the other descriptors in all test cases. Results demonstrate the
effectiveness and advantage of our proposed adaptive binning
strategies in terms of the location and orientation quantization.
The extracted match points of the proposed method on all real
image pairs are shown in Fig. 9.
The results depicted in Fig. 8 show that the LIOP and BRISK
descriptors are very sensitive in multisensor images (images

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 SEDAGHAT AND EBADI: REMOTE SENSING IMAGE MATCHING BASED ON AB-SIFT DESCRIPTOR 5291

Fig. 8. Experimental results on the real data sets (third–tenth image pairs). (a) Recall. (b) Precision. (c) Number of CMs. (d) RMSE.

Fig. 9. Matching results for the real image pairs. (a) Third image pair: SPOT 4–SPOT 4. (b) Fourth image pair: IRS-1C–IRS-1C. (c) Fifth image pair:
IRS-1C–SPOT 4. (d) Sixth image pair: SPOT 5–SPOT 6. (e) Seventh image pair: WorldView–QuickBird. (f) Eighth image pair: GeoEye 1–QuickBird.
(g) Ninth image pair: IRS-1C–ASTER. (h) Tenth image pair: IKONOS–IRS-P6.

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 5292 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING, VOL. 53, NO. 10, OCTOBER 2015
5–10) and have the weakest results compared with the other
descriptors, particularly the proposed AB-SIFT descriptor. The
LIOP descriptor uses the intensity order pooling and the relative
order of neighbor pixels, and it is only robust to monotonic
intensity changes, whereas the multisensor remote sensing im-
ages have nonlinear intensity differences. On the other hand, the
BRISK descriptor is composed as a binary string by concatenat-
ing the results of simple brightness comparison tests; thus, it is
sensitive to nonlinear intensity differences similar to the LIOP
descriptor.
The performance of the SIFT, the GLOH, and DAISY is
approximately the same; however, in most cases, DAISY per-
forms better than the SIFT and the GLOH. All three methods
are based on gradient location and orientation, and they use
a regular descriptor structure based on a gradient histogram
with the same size, which cannot effectively model the view-
point local distortions. However, the proposed method uses an
adaptive strategy for portioning and gradient histogram binning.
This technique significantly increases the descriptor capability
because the inner circle ring that is more accurate has more
effect in the descriptor elements.
In contrast with all the other descriptors, the developed
URHA algorithm is used for feature extraction, and the po-
sitional accuracy of the proposed AB-SIFT descriptor outper-
formed the other descriptors in terms of the RMSE for all the
sets of test images, as depicted in Figs. 5(d), 6(d), and 8(d). This
indicates that the proposed descriptor extracts more features
with higher accuracy.
Because the implementation of the proposed AB-SIFT
descriptor is closely related to the standard SIFT, its com-
putational complexity is similar to the SIFT. Based on our
experimental results (using an Intel Core2 2.4-GHz central
processing unit with a memory of 4 GB), the average time of
computing the descriptor for each feature is 5.7 ms for the SIFT,
14.2 ms for DAISY, 5.9 ms for the GLOH, 6.8 ms for the LIOP,
and 6.1 ms for the AB-SIFT.
IV. C ONCLUSION
In this paper, a novel descriptor for fully automatic remote
sensing image matching has been introduced. First, a new
URHA feature detector algorithm is developed, which effec-
tively extracts high-quality local affine invariant features in the
full distribution of the location and the scale. Then, a novel
AB-SIFT descriptor using a novel adaptive binning strategy
is introduced to describe the image content around a local
feature. Different from traditional distribution-based descrip-
tors, the proposed AB-SIFT descriptor uses an adaptive his-
togram quantization strategy for both the location and gradient
orientations, which significantly increases the discriminability
and robustness of the final descriptor. The experimental results
on a variety of synthetic and real satellite image pairs reveal
that the AB-SIFT descriptor shows better recall, precision, and
positional accuracy than other descriptors, including the SIFT,
DAISY, GLOH, LIOP, and BRISK descriptors.
The proposed adaptive quantization strategy can be extended
for other distribution-based descriptors. As future work, the
authors are going to evaluate the proposed approach in the
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registration of remote sensing images based on nonrigid image
registration methods and thin-plate-spline transformation to
deal with significant local geometric distortions. The proposed
AB-SIFT descriptor, similar to the SIFT and GLOH descriptors,
uses the weighted GLOH to compute the descriptor. Signifi-
cant illumination differences, particularly in multisensor remote
sensing image pairs with nonlinear and inverse intensity differ-
ences, may degrade the performance of the gradient histograms.
Some robust measures to nonlinear intensity differences, such
as a self-similarity measure [49], can be used for descriptor
computation, which are suggested as future studies. It should
be noted that, similar to many other feature-based matching
methodologies, the proposed algorithm requires some distinc-
tive features; therefore, it may encounter some problems in an
image with homogeneous areas.
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Amin Sedaghat received the M.S. degree in pho-
togrammetry engineering from Khajeh Nasir (K.N.)
Toosi University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, in
2010. He is currently working toward the Ph.D.
degree in the Department of Geomatics, Faculty of
Geodesy and Geomatics Engineering, K.N. Toosi
University of Technology.
His professional interests include remote sensing
image processing and digital photogrammetry.
Hamid Ebadi received the Ph.D. degree in geo-
matics engineering from the University of Calgary,
Calgary, AB, Canada, in 1997.
He is currently an Associate Professor with the
Department of Photogrammetry and Remote Sens-
ing, Faculty of Geodesy and Geomatics Engineer-
ing, Khajeh Nasir Toosi University of Technology,
Tehran, Iran, where he is also a member of the
Center of Excellence for Geospatial Information
Technology. His research interests include digital
photogrammetry, information extraction from high-
resolution satellite and aerial imagery, and the integration of photogrammetry
and geospatial information systems.