In some applications, as in image registration of serial sections in biology or medicine, it is often necessary to find a rigid body transformation that matches features under natural deformations in two images. Usual approaches deal with natural deformation as a problem of error minimization of displacement of markers. In this paper we present a registration technique which effectively models the deformation by using the physical model of an elastically deformable thin plate. The proposed method makes use of Thin Plate Splines as a registration function enabling a clear separation between the effects of the sensor positioning and the effects of deformations. The application of the method is shown using simulated data, and its strengths and flaws are analyzed
Image registration; Thin Plate Spline; energy minimization; deformation modeling; image matching; rigid body transformation
