Multimodal image registration techniques: a comprehensive survey

This manuscript presents a review of state-of-the-art techniques proposed in the literature for multimodal image registration, addressing instances where images from different modalities need to be precisely aligned in the same reference system. This scenario arises when the images to be registered come from different modalities, among the visible and thermal spectral bands, 3D-RGB, or flash-no flash, or NIR-visible. The review spans different techniques from classical approaches to more modern ones based on deep learning, aiming to highlight the particularities required at each step in the registration pipeline when dealing with multimodal images. It is noteworthy that medical images are excluded from this review due to their specific characteristics, including the use of both active and passive sensors or the non-rigid nature of the body contained in the image.