Multi-modal Image Registration by Minimising Kullback-Leibler Distance

In this paper, we propose a multi-modal image registration method based on the a priori knowledge of the expected joint intensity distribution estimated from aligned training images. The goal of the registration is to find the optimal transformation such that the discrepancy between the expected and the observed joint intensity distributions is minimised. The difference between distributions is measured using the Kullback-Leibler distance (KLD). Experimental results in 3D-3D registration show that the KLD based registration algorithm is less dependent on the size of the sampling region than the Maximum log-Likelihood based registration method. We have also shown that, if manual alignment is unavailable, the expected joint intensity distribution can be estimated based on the segmented and corresponding structures from a pair of novel images. The proposed method has been applied to 2D-3D registration problems between digital subtraction angiograms (DSAs) and magnetic resonance angiographic (MRA) image volumes.