Multi-modal image sequence registration is a challenging problem that consists in aligning two image sequences of the same scene acquired with a different sensor, hence containing different characteristics. We focus in this paper on the registration of optical and infra-red image sequences acquired during the flight of a helicopter. Both cameras are located at different positions and they provide complementary informations. We propose a fast registration method based on the edge information: a new criterion is defined in order to take into account both the magnitude and the orientation of the edges of the images to register. We derive a robust technique based on a gradient ascent and combined with a reliability test in order to quickly determine the optimal transformation that matches the two image sequences. We show on real multi-modal data that our method outperforms classical registration methods, thanks to the shape information provided by the contours. Besides, results on synthetic images and real experimental conditions show that the proposed algorithm manages to find the optimal transformation in few iterations, achieving a rate of about 8 frames per second.