Nonlinear registration using B-spline feature approximation and image similarity
June-Sic Kim, Jae‐Seok Kim, In Young Kim, Sun Il Kim · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2001
The warping methods are broadly classified into the image-matching method based on similar pixel intensity distribution and the feature-matching method using distinct anatomical feature. Feature based methods may fail to match local variation of two images. However, the method globally matches features well. False matches corresponding to local minima of the underlying energy functions can be obtained through the similarity based methods. To avoid local minima problem, we proposes non-linear deformable registration method utilizing global information of feature matching and the local information of image matching. To define the feature, gray matter and white matter of brain tissue are segmented by Fuzzy C-Mean (FCM) algorithm. B-spline approximation technique is used for feature matching. We use a multi-resolution B-spline approximation method which modifies multilevel B-spline interpolation method. It locally changes the resolution of the control lattice in proportion to the distance between features of two images. Mutual information is used for similarity measure. The deformation fields are locally refined until maximize the similarity. In two 3D T1 weighted MRI test, this method maintained the accuracy by conventional image matching methods without the local minimum problem.