A Fast Registration Method Using IP and Its Application to Ultrasound Image Registration

Abstract

This paper presents a fast registration method based on solving an energy minimization problem derived by implicit polynomials (IPs). Once a target object is encoded by an IP, it will be driven fast towards a corresponding source object along the IP’s gradient flow without using point-wise correspondences. This registration process is accelerated by a new IP transformation method. Instead of the time-consuming transformation to a large discrete data set, the new method can transform the polynomial coefficients to maintain the same Euclidean transformation. Its computational efficiency enables us to improve a new application for real-time Ultrasound (US) pose estimation. The reported experimental results demonstrate the capabilities of our method in overcoming the limitations of a noisy, unconstrained, and freehand US image, resulting in fast and robust registration.