A novel elastic image registration approach is proposed, which can register both 2D medical images and gel electrophoresis automatically and accurately. Firstly, the global affine registration method based on image intensity is used to initialise a starting estimation of the robust registration algorithm. Then, by using iterative landmark based algorithm, the affine registration results are registered to further improve the accuracy in the second step, in which, the novel automatic landmark localization method is introduced and the thin-plate spline is used to refine the registration precision. Experimental results are presented for the registration of the 2D Phantom images and gel electrophoresis.