In this paper, an automatic method is proposed to perform image registration
in visible and infrared pair of video sequences for multiple targets. In
multimodal image analysis like image fusion systems, color and IR sensors are
placed close to each other and capture a same scene simultaneously, but the
videos are not properly aligned by default because of different fields of view,
image capturing information, working principle and other camera specifications.
Because the scenes are usually not planar, alignment needs to be performed
continuously by extracting relevant common information. In this paper, we
approximate the shape of the targets by polygons and use affine transformation
for aligning the two video sequences. After background subtraction, keypoints
on the contour of the foreground blobs are detected using DCE (Discrete Curve
Evolution)technique. These keypoints are then described by the local shape at
each point of the obtained polygon. The keypoints are matched based on the
convexity of polygon's vertices and Euclidean distance between them. Only good
matches for each local shape polygon in a frame, are kept. To achieve a global
affine transformation that maximises the overlapping of infrared and visible
foreground pixels, the matched keypoints of each local shape polygon are stored
temporally in a buffer for a few number of frames. The matrix is evaluated at
each frame using the temporal buffer and the best matrix is selected, based on
an overlapping ratio criterion. Our experimental results demonstrate that this
method can provide highly accurate registered images and that we outperform a
previous related method