Improving Comparative Radiography by Multi-resolution 3D-2D Evolutionary Image Registration

Abstract

Comparative radiography has a crucial role in the forensic identification endeavor. A proposal to automate the comparison of ante-mortem and post-mortem radiographs has been recently proposed based on an evolutionary image registration method. It considers the use of differential evolution to estimate the parameters of a 3D-2D registration transformation that automatically superimposes a bone surface model over a radiograph of the same bone. The main drawback of this proposal is the high computational cost. This contribution tackled this high computational cost by incorporating multi-resolution and multi-start strategies into its optimization process. We have studied the accuracy, robustness and computation time of the different configurations of the proposed method with synthetic images of patellae, clavicles and frontal sinuses. A significant improvement has been obtained in comparison to the state-of-the-art method in term of the robustness of the optimization method and computational cost with a drop in accuracy smaller than the 0.5% of the pixels of the silhouette of the bone or cavity.