Teichmüller extremal mapping and its applications to landmark matching registration

Registration, which aims to find an optimal 1-1 correspondence between shapes, is an important process in different research areas. Conformal mappings have been widely used to obtain a diffeomorphism between shapes that minimizes angular distortion. Conformal registrations are beneficial since it preserves the local geometry well. However, when landmark constraints are enforced, conformal mappings generally do not exist. This motivates us to look for a unique landmark matching quasi-conformal registration, which minimizes the conformality distortion. Under suitable condition on the landmark constraints, a unique diffeomporphism, called the Teichmüller extremal mapping between two surfaces can be obtained, which minimizes the maximal conformality distortion. In this paper, we propose an efficient iterative algorithm, called the Quasi-conformal (QC) iterations, to compute the Teichmüller mapping. The basic idea is to represent the set of diffeomorphisms using Beltrami coefficients (BCs), and look for an optimal BC associated to the desired Teichmüller mapping. The associated diffeomorphism can be efficiently reconstructed from the optimal BC using the Linear Beltrami Solver(LBS). Using BCs to represent diffeomorphisms guarantees the diffeomorphic property of the registration. Using our proposed method, the Teichmüller mapping can be accurately and efficiently computed within 10 seconds. The obtained registration is guaranteed to be bijective. The proposed algorithm can also be extended to compute Teichmüller mapping with soft landmark constraints. We applied the proposed algorithm to real applications, such as brain landmark matching registration, constrained texture mapping and human face registration. Experimental results shows that our method is both effective and efficient in computing a nonoverlap landmark matching registration with least amount of conformality distortion.