accordance with the principles of the present invention by crosscorrelating the complex i e magnitude and phase gradients over the site in particular the gradient magnitudes are weighted by a multiplicative function that decreases with increasing difference in the directions of the gradients in the two images three additional factors are taken into account a weighting function w u03b4 180 must be equal to w u03b4 where u03b4 is the difference in degrees between the respective gradient angles this is due to the fact that the phase of the complex gradient can differ by u00b1 180 degrees at a given edge depending on the polarity of the brightness difference across that boundary a preferred weighting function that is used is w u03b4 cos 2n u03b4 where n is a positive integer in the explanation that follows n is taken to be unity the cross correlation function is normalized to reduce the dependence on the magnitudes of the complex gradients this is because the magnitude of the gradient across a given boundary varies depending on the brightness difference across that boundary the crosscorrelation function is normalized to reduce the dependence on the number of edges within the site without this normalization the crosscorrelation function would be highest for sites containing the most edges i e clutter fig2 illustrates exemplary image misregistration that is corrected by the present invention in fig2 image block a is offset horizontally and vertically within image block b to determine the match point by way of example suppose image block a has w columns and h rows while image block b has w gt w columns and h gt h rows suppose that a w by h chip.