  This letter proposes a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image registration
method named Feature-Area Optimization (FAO). First, the traditional area-based
optimization model is reconstructed and decomposed into three key but uncertain
factors: initialization, slice set and regularization. Next, structural
features are extracted by scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) in
dual-resolution space (SIFT-DRS), a novel SIFT-Like method dedicated to FAO.
Then, the three key factors are determined based on these features. Finally,
solving the factor-determined optimization model can get the registration
result. A series of experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can
register multi-temporal SAR images accurately and efficiently.
