Weighted and deterministic entropy measure for image registration using mutual information

Previous image registration schemes based on mutual information use Shannon's entropy measure, and they have been successfully applied for mono- and multimodality registration. There are cases, however, where maximization of mutual information does not lead to the correct spatial alignment of a pair of images. Some failures are due to the presence of local or spurious global maxima. In this paper we explore whether the normalization of mutual information via the use of a weight based on the size of region of overlap, improves the rate of successful alignments by reducing the presence of suboptimal extrema. In addition, we examine the utility of a deterministic entropy measure. The results of the present study indicate that: (1) the normalized mutual information provides a larger capture range and is more robust, with respect to optimization parameters, than the non-normalized mutual information, and (2) the optimization of mutual information with the deterministic entropy measure takes, on average, fewer iterations than when using Shannon's entropy measure. We conclude that the normalized mutual information using the deterministic entropy measure is a faster and more robust function for registration than the traditional mutual information.