A scale-space approach to landmark constrained image registration

Abstract

Adding external knowledge improves the results for ill-posed problems. In this paper we present a new multi-level optimization framework for image registration when adding landmark constraints on the transformation. Previous approaches are based on a fixed discretization and lack of allowing for continuous landmark positions that are not on grid points. Our novel approach overcomes these problems such that we can apply multi-level methods which have been proven being crucial to avoid local minima in the course of optimization. Furthermore, for our numerical method we are able to use constraint elimination such that we trace back the landmark constrained problem to a unconstrained optimization leading to an efficient algorithm. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.