High-accuracy estimation of image rotation using 1D phase-only correlation

This paper presents a technique for high-accuracy estimation of image rotation using 1D Phase-Only Correlation (POC). The rotation angle between two images is estimated as follows: (i) compute the amplitude spectra of the given images, (ii) transform the coordinate system of amplitude spectra from Cartesian coordinates to polar coordinates, and (iii) estimate the translational displacement between the polar-mapped amplitude spectra to obtain the rotation angle. While the conventional approach is to employ 2D POC for high-accuracy displacement estimation in (iii), this paper proposes the use of 1D POC with an adaptive line selection scheme. The proposed technique makes possible to improve the accuracy of rotation estimation for low contrast images of artificial objects with regular geometric shapes and to reduce the total computation cost by 50%.