A Multi-Level Cross-Modal Edge Filtering Method for High-Resolution Optical-SAR Image Registration

Optical and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image registration is a fundamental task in remote sensing information fusion, yet it remains challenging due to significant differences in imaging mechanisms, radiation characteristics, and noise properties between the two modalities. Existing public datasets suffer from limited resolution, small scale, and insufficient scene diversity, and these limitations have hindered algorithm development. This paper constructs a large-scale, high-resolution optical–SAR registration dataset based on the HongTu-1 satellite 3-m SAR imagery and Google Earth optical imagery at zoom level 17, covering diverse scenes across China with a standardized pipeline including terrain correction, geometric alignment, standardized slicing, and quality filtering. Building upon this dataset, a hand-crafted keypoint-based cross-modal registration method is proposed, incorporating multi-level edge filtering and hybrid feature detection. Unlike conventional hand-crafted methods such as RIFT, SRIF, and LNIFT, which mainly refine keypoint detection, description, or matching within a SIFT-style pipeline, the core novelty of this work lies in SAR-specific preprocessing and multi-level hybrid filtering. These components are designed to suppress speckle while extracting more stable and discriminative shared edge responses for cross-modal registration. An improved Log-domain Total Variation (Log-TV) denoising model is introduced for SAR preprocessing. A hybrid edge filtering framework combining phase congruency analysis and Structured Random Forest (SRF) edge detection is constructed within a Gaussian scale space. A dual-branch feature detection scheme integrating blob and corner features is designed with a robust orientation assignment strategy. Feature description uses the Gradient Location–Orientation Histogram (GLOH) descriptor with Principal Component Analysis (PCA) reduction, while geometric estimation employs the Fast Sample Consensus (FSC) algorithm. Experiments on the self-constructed HT dataset and on the public OSdataset and SAR2Opt benchmarks show that the proposed method consistently achieves low RMSE and high success rates. It also maintains competitive efficiency among hand-crafted methods while retaining strong robustness to scale and rotation variations.