Cross-Modal Image Registration via Rasterized Parameter Prediction for Object Tracking

Abstract

Object tracking requires heterogeneous images that are well registered in advance, with cross-modal image registration used to transform images of the same scene generated by different sensors into the same coordinate system. Infrared and visible light sensors are the most widely used in environmental perception; however, misaligned pixel coordinates in cross-modal images remain a challenge in practical applications of the object tracking task. Traditional feature-based approaches can only be applied in single-mode scenarios, and cannot be well extended to cross-modal scenarios. Recent deep learning technology employs neural networks with large parameter scales for prediction of feature points for image registration. However, supervised learning methods require numerous manually aligned images for model training, leading to the scalability and adaptivity problems. The Unsupervised Deep Homography Network (UDHN) applies Mean Absolute Error (MAE) metrics for cost function computation without labelled images; however, it is currently inapplicable for cross-modal image registration. In this paper, we propose aligning infrared and visible images using a rasterized parameter prediction algorithm with similarity measurement evaluation. Specifically, we use Cost Volume (CV) to predict registration parameters from coarse-grained to fine-grained layers with a raster constraint for multimodal feature fusion. In addition, motivated by the utilization of mutual information in contrastive learning, we apply a cross-modal similarity measurement algorithm for semi-supervised image registration. Our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the MS-COCO and FLIR datasets.