Brownian Warps: A Least Committed Prior for Non-rigid Registration

Non-rigid registration requires a smoothness or regularization term for making the warp field regular. Standard models in use here include b-splines and thin plate splines. In this paper, we suggest a regularizer which is based on first principles, is symmetric with respect to source and destination, and fulfills a natural semi-group property for warps. We construct the regularizer from a distribution on warps. This distribution arises as the limiting distribution for concatenations of warps just as the Gaussian distribution arises as the limiting distribution for the addition of numbers. Through an Euler-Lagrange formulation, algorithms for obtaining maximum likelihood registrations are constructed. The technique is demonstrated using 2D examples.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2002
• Where: MICCAI
• Authors: Mads Nielsen, Peter Johansen, Andrew D. Jackson, Benny Lautrup
• Keywords: Gaussian Distribution Arises, Maximum Likelihood Registrations, Medical Imaging, MICCAI 2002, Regularization Term