Focusing on the problem of poor matching due to nonlinear radiation difference and speckle noise between optical and SAR images, an automatic registration method of coupling phase congruency and mutual information is proposed. First, the stable feature points with uniform distribution are detected from the reference image based on the phase congruency moment feature map. Second, a new similarity measure called maximum index map mutual information is constructed, and it is used to achieve corresponding points by employing a template matching strategy. Finally, the outliers are eliminated by marginalizing sample consensus algorithm and the geometric correction of piecewise linear transformation is used to realize high accuracy registration between images. The proposed method is verified by four sets of medium and high resolution optical and SAR images. The result indicates that the suggested approach has higher registration accuracy than other advanced methods.