Image Registration: From SIFT to Deep Learning

Image registration is the process of transforming different images of one scene into the same coordinate system. These images can be taken at different times (multi-temporal registration), by different sensors (multi-modal registration), and/or from different viewpoints. The spatial relationships between these images can be rigid (translations and rotations), affine (shears for example), homographies, or complex large deformations models. Image registration has a wide variety of applications: it is essential as soon as the task at hand requires comparing multiple images of the same scene. It is very common in the field of medical imagery, as well as for satellite image analysis and optical flow. In this article, we will focus on a few different ways to perform image registration between a reference image and a sensed image.