Non-rigid image registration with SalphaS filters.

Abstract

In this paper, based on the SalphaS distributions, we design SalphaS filters and use the filters as a new feature extraction method for non-rigid medical image registration. In brain MR images, the energy distributions of different frequency bands often exhibit heavy-tailed behavior. Such non-Gaussian behavior is essential for non-rigid image registration but cannot be satisfactorily modeled by the conventional Gabor filters. This leads to unsatisfactory modeling of voxels located at the salient regions of the images. To this end, we propose the SalphaS filters for modeling the heavy-tailed behavior of the energy distributions of brain MR images, and show that the Gabor filter is a special case of the SalphaS filter. The maximum response orientation selection criterion is defined for each frequency band to achieve rotation invariance. In our framework, if the brain MR images are already segmented, each voxel can be automatically assigned a weighting factor based on the Fisher's separation criterion and it is shown that the registration performance can be further improved. The proposed method has been compared with the free-form-deformation based method, Demons algorithm and a method using Gabor features by conducting non-rigid image registration experiments. It is observed that the proposed method achieves the best registration accuracy among all the compared methods in both the simulated and real datasets obtained from the BrainWeb and IBSR respectively.