Medical image rigid registration using a novel binary feature descriptor and modified affine transform

Abstract

Robust and reliable features with noise immunity, rotation-invariance, and low-dimensionality are the challenging aspects of pattern recognition. In this study, the authors presented a novel low-dimensional binary feature descriptor local diagonal Laplacian pattern (LDLP) for medical image registration. LDLP method is developed by defining the local relationship between a centre pixel and its diagonal neighbours and encoding it to a binary feature vector. The idea of centre-diagonal pixel correlation has drastically reduced the length of the feature vector without compromising the quality of local texture analysis. In the proposed work, first, the LDLP feature histograms of computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance (MR), and ultrasound images are obtained. Further, these LDLP features of individual medical images are considered as target/fixed objects while their corresponding rotated and noisy features are considered as moving/floating objects to perform mono-modal rigid registration using an improved Procrustes analysis-based affine transform. The registration quality is examined by calculating the squared intensity error and the results are compared with the existing binary patterns such as local binary patterns, local tetra patterns, and local diagonal extrema patterns. The proposed LDLP feature descriptor-based rigid registration has attained relatively better performance in terms of registration accuracy and computational complexity.