Image registration based on the structure tensor of the local phase

Image registration of medical images in the presence of large intra-image signal fluctuations is a challenging task. Our paper addresses this problem by introducing a new concept based on the structure tensor of the local phase. The local phase is calculated from the monogenic signal representation of the images. The local phase image is hardly affected by unwanted signal fluctuations due to a space-variant background and a space-variant contrast. The boundary structure tensor combines the responses of edges and corners/junctions in one tensor, which has several advantages, compared to other structure tensors. We reorient the structure tensor during the registration by means of the finite-strain technique. The structure tensor is only calculated once during a preprocessing step. The results demonstrate that the proposed method effectively deals with large signal fluctuations. It performs significantly better than competing techniques.