A Modified Local Binary Pattern Descriptor for SAR Image Matching

Abstract

Image matching is an important step which is taken in most applications of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. In this letter, a method is proposed for SAR image matching which introduces a modified local binary pattern (LBP) as a descriptor. Multitextural feature LBP (MTF-LBP) uses the gray-level cooccurrence matrix to increase image texture information. MTF-LBP creates bit plane for each point candidate for matching. Then, using hamming distance, true matches are determined. Experiments are conducted on four spaceborne SAR image pairs including Radarsat-2, TerraSAR-X, ALOS-PALSAR, and Sentinel-1. The proposed method is compared with five common LBP approaches. The results indicate that the proposed method has a better performance in terms of the number of true matches.