Spline Pyramids for Inter-Modal Image Registration Using Mutual Information
P. Thévenaz, Michael A. Unser · 1997
We propose a new optimizer for multiresolution image registration. It is adapted to a criterion known as mutual information and is well suited to inter-modality. Our iteration strategy is inspired by the Marquardt-Levenberg algorithm, even though the underlying problem is not least-squares. We develop a framework based on a continuous polynomial spline representation of images. Together with the use of Parzen histogram estimates, it allows for closedform expressions of the gradient and Hessian of the criterion. Tremendous simplifications result from the choice of Parzen windows satisfying the partition of unity, also based on B-splines. We use this framework to compute an image pyramid and to set our optimizer in a multiresolution context. We perform several experiments and show that it is particularly well adapted to a coarse-to-fine optimization strategy. We compare our approach to the popular Powell algorithm and conclude that our proposed optimizer is faster, at no cost in robustness or precision.