Fuzzy smoothed composition of local mapping transformations for non-rigid image registration

Abstract

This paper presents a novel method for medical image registration. The global transformation is obtained by composing affine transformations, which are recovered locally from given landmarks.Transformations of adjacent regions are smoothed to avoid blocking artifacts, so that a unique continuous and differentiable global function is obtained. Such composition is operated using a technique derived from fuzzy C-means clustering. The method was successfully tested on several datasets; results, both qualitative and quantitative, are shown. Comparisons with other methods are reported. Final considerations on the efficiency of the technique are explained. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.