Piecewise affine registration of biological images for volume reconstruction

This manuscript tackles the reconstruction of 3-D volumes via mono-modal registration of series of 2-D biological images (histological sections, autoradiographs, cryosections, etc.). The process of acquiring these images typically induces composite transformations that we model as a number of rigid or affine local transformations embedded in an elastic one. We propose a registration approach closely derived from this model. Given a pair of input images, we first compute a dense similarity field between them with a block matching algorithm. We use as a similarity measure an extension of the classical correlation coefficient that improves the consistency of the field. A hierarchical clustering algorithm then automatically partitions the field into a number of classes from which we extract independent pairs of sub-images. Our clustering algorithm relies on the Earth mover's distribution metric and is additionally guided by robust least-square estimation of the transformations associated with each cluster. Finally, the pairs of sub-images are, independently, affinely registered and a hybrid affine/non-linear interpolation scheme is used to compose the output registered image. We investigate the behavior of our approach on several batches of histological data and discuss its sensitivity to parameters and noise.