3D reconstruction: The registration problem

Abstract

Three dimensional (3D) reconstruction of serial sections through biological tissue is a very important method for visualizing and quantifying the 3D relationships between internal structures. This project involves the automation of the 3D reconstruction process, focusing on the problem of registering or aligning successive serial sections. Serial sections can be misregistered with respect to rotation, translation and scaling (if magnification is not constant). A linear least squares fitting procedure is developed to determine the required registration transformation based on a set of labeled feature points. The results obtained from using two different types of feature points are evaluated and compared: (1) manually selected feature points and (2) characteristic shape points computed from the contours which describe specific shape properties (e.g., centroid and radius weighted mean point). These results demonstrate that good registration accuracy is obtained using both kinds of feature points under conditions in which the contours do not have exact matches.