Abstract: Some experiments were designed to systematically assess the applicability of the scale invariant feature transformation (SIFT) to synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image registration. The experiments showed that the SIFT can accurately register slant range to slant range, slant range to ground range and ground range to ellipsoid geo-coded SAR images, provided that all the multi-temporal images are acquired in the same ascending or descending orbit. A subset processing based method was suggested to adapt SIFT to the registration of remote sensing images. The experiment showed that although the total number of feature points detected through image subset processing decreases, the feature point repeating rate is still higher than 76\% and can meet the need of the registration of two big images. However, the huge time required for matching was shown to be the major technic bottleneck prohibiting its application to remote sensing. Some possible solutions to this problem were pointed out, and the future applications of invariant feature matching to remote sensing field were suggested.