Efficient registration of optical and IR images for automatic plant water stress assessment

Abstract

Automatic registration of optical and IR images is a crucial step towards constructing an automated irrigation control system where plant water information is sensed via thermal imaging. The scene of the IR image is assumed to be completely included in the optical image and the alignment between the common scene in the two images may involve translation and rotation by a small angle, though a small scale difference may also be present. This automatic registration of data from two quite different, non-rigid imaging regimes presents several challenges, which cannot be overcome using common image processing techniques. In this paper, a fully automatic image registration algorithm for the alignm..