A new approach to the problem of registration of ultrasound images is presented, using a concept of Nonlinear Correlation Information Entropy (NCIE) as the matching criterion. The proposed method applies NCIE to measure the correlation degree between the image intensities of corresponding voxel in the floating and reference images. Registration is achieved by adjustment of the relative position until NCIE between the images is maximized. However, unlike mutual information (MI), NCIE varies in the closed interval [0, 1], and around the extremum it varies sharply, which makes it possible that thresholds of NCIE can be used to boost the search for the registration transformation. Using this feature of NCIE, we combine the downhill simplex searching algorithm to register the ultrasound images. The simulations are conducted to testify the effectiveness and rapidity of the proposed registration method, in which the ultrasound floating images are aligned to the reference images with required registration accuracy. Moreover, the NCIE based method can overcome local minima problem by setting thresholds and can take care of the differences in contrast between the floating and reference images.
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