Fuzzy Smoothed Composition of Local Mapping Transformations for Non-rigid Image Registration

This paper presents a novel method for medical image regis- tration. The global transformation is obtained by composing affine trans- formations, which are recovered locally from given landmarks. Transfor- mations of adjacent regions are smoothed to avoid blocking artifacts, so that a unique continuous and differentiable global function is obtained. Such composition is operated using a technique derived from fuzzy C- means clustering. The method was successfully tested on several datasets; results, both qualitative and quantitative, are shown. Comparisons with other methods are reported. Final considerations on the efficiency of the technique are explained.