Automatic estimation of registration parameters: image similarity and regularization

摘要

Image registration is a procedure to spatially align two images that is often used in, for example, computer-aided diagnosis or segmentation applications. To maximize the flexibility of image registration methods, they depend on many registration parameters that must be fine-tuned for each specific application. Tuning parameters is a time-consuming task, that would ideally be performed for each individual registration. However, doing this manually for each registration is too time-consuming, and therefore we would like to do this automatically. This paper proposes a methodology to estimate one of most important parameters in a registration procedure, the regularization setting, on the basis of the image similarity. We test our method on a set of images of prostate cancer patients and show that using the proposed methodology, we can improve the result of image registration when compared to using an average-best parameter.