Regional Infrared and Visible Image Registration for Distribution Substation Areas With Wide Depth of Field

Infrared and visible image registration is a key task in automated distribution network inspection. Previous approaches typically apply a single homography to align infrared and visible images leading to local misalignment. To address this, this study proposes a novel region‐based registration algorithm specifically designed for wide‐depth distribution substation areas inspection. The proposed method begins by generating matched keypoints using SuperPoint and LightGlue. Second, Adaptive label k‐means is employed to assign k‐category labels to the paired keypoints. Third, the region annotation module and SegmentAnything 2 propagate the point labels to region labels. Finally, different homographies are applied to the corresponding regions based on the labels with a depth rule used to determine which pixels should be preserved in overlapping areas. Experimental results show that the proposed method accurately registers infrared and visible images across multi‐depth planes, achieving a root mean square error of 5.53 and a precision of 0.752, striking a balance between registration accuracy and processing speed.