Time multiscale regularization for nonlinear image registration

Regularization-based methods are commonly used for image registration. However, fixed regularizers have limitations in capturing details and describing the dynamic registration process. To address this issue, we propose a time multiscale registration framework for nonlinear image registration in this paper. Our approach replaces the fixed regularizer with a monotone decreasing sequence, and iteratively uses the residual of the previous step as the input for registration. Particularly, first, we introduce a dynamically varying regularization strategy that updates regularizers at each iteration and incorporates them with a multiscale framework. This approach guarantees an overall smooth deformation field in the initial stage of registration and fine-tunes local details as the images become more similar. We then deduce convergence analysis under certain conditions on the regularizers and parameters. Further, we introduce a TV-like regularizer to demonstrate the efficiency of our method. Finally, we compare our proposed multiscale algorithm with some existing methods on both synthetic images and pulmonary computed tomography (CT) images. The experimental results validate that our proposed algorithm outperforms the compared methods, especially in preserving details during image registration with sharp structures.