Feature-Based Registration of Medical Images: Estimation and Validation of the Pose Accuracy

We provide in this article a generic framework for pose estimation from geometric features. We propose more particularly two algorithms: a gradient descent on the Riemannian least squares distance and on the Mahalanobis distance. For each method, we provide a way to compute the uncertainty of the resulting transformation. The analysis and comparison of the algorithms show their advantages and drawbacks and point out the very good prediction on the transformation accuracy. An application in medical image analysis validates the uncertainty estimation on real data and demonstrates that, using adapted and rigorous tools, we can detect very small modifications in medical images. We believe that these algorithms could be easily embedded in many applications and provide a thorough basis for computing many image statistics.