Feature-based groupwise registration of historical aerial images to present-day ortho-photo maps

In this paper, we address the registration of historical WWII images to present-day ortho-photo maps for the purpose of geolocalization. Due to the challenging nature of this problem, we propose to register the images jointly as a group rather than in a step-by-step manner. To this end, we exploit Hough Voting spaces as pairwise registration estimators and show how they can be integrated into a probabilistic groupwise registration framework that can be efficiently optimized. The feature-based nature of our registration framework allows to register images with a-priori unknown translational and rotational relations, and is also able to handle scale changes of up to 30% in our test data due to a final geometrically guided matching step. The superiority of the proposed method over existing pairwise and groupwise registration methods is demonstrated on eight highly challenging sets of historical images with corresponding ortho-photo maps.