Non-rigid image registration using graph-cuts

Med Image Comput Comput Assist Interv. 2007;10(Pt 1):916-24. doi: 10.1007/978-3-540-75757-3_111.

Abstract

Non-rigid image registration is an ill-posed yet challenging problem due to its supernormal high degree of freedoms and inherent requirement of smoothness. Graph-cuts method is a powerful combinatorial optimization tool which has been successfully applied into image segmentation and stereo matching. Under some specific constraints, graph-cuts method yields either a global minimum or a local minimum in a strong sense. Thus, it is interesting to see the effects of using graph-cuts in non-rigid image registration. In this paper, we formulate non-rigid image registration as a discrete labeling problem. Each pixel in the source image is assigned a displacement label (which is a vector) indicating which position in the floating image it is spatially corresponding to. A smoothness constraint based on first derivative is used to penalize sharp changes in displacement labels across pixels. The whole system can be optimized by using the graph-cuts method via alpha-expansions. We compare 2D and 3D registration results of our method with two state-of-the-art approaches. It is found that our method is more robust to different challenging non-rigid registration cases with higher registration accuracy.

Publication types

  • Comparative Study
  • Evaluation Study

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Artificial Intelligence*
  • Brain / anatomy & histology*
  • Diffusion Magnetic Resonance Imaging / methods*
  • Humans
  • Image Enhancement / methods*
  • Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / methods*
  • Imaging, Three-Dimensional / methods
  • Pattern Recognition, Automated / methods*
  • Reproducibility of Results
  • Sensitivity and Specificity
  • Subtraction Technique*