Analysis of Reliability and Impact Factors of Mutual Information Similarity Criterion for Remote Sensing Imagery Template Matching

Reliability of similarity measure is a key factor for successful image matching. In this paper, mutual information is introduced to template image matching as a similarity measure. Its ability of adapting to different scene, overcoming the grey reversal, and factors which influence on the successful matching of mutual information method are discussed. These factors include signal-noise ratio, information content and self-similarity. The test data are remote sensing images captured by different sensors, with different spatial resolution and at different seasons. Some typical scenes such as city, town, village, river, stream, and field land are used to test its ability of adapting to different scenes and the ability to overcome the grey reversal. The experiments manifest that there is no strong relationship between success rate and the amount of signal-noise ratio or information content for the mutual information matching method. The successful matching based on mutual information is mainly affected by whether there are similar pattern areas in the reference image or not. The experiments also indicate that when the scene has large non-linear change of grey, the success rate of mutual information matching method is much greater than that of cross-correlation method. Corresponding author. Tel.: +86 025 83787578; E-mail addresses: [email protected]; [email protected].