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This paper deals with area-based subpixel image registration under the rotation-isometric scaling-translation transformation hypothesis. Our approach is based on parametrical modeling of geometrically transformed textural image fragments and maximum-likelihood estimation of the transformation vector between them. Due to the parametrical approach based on the fractional Brownian motion modeling of the local fragments' texture, the proposed estimator \mboxML_\mathrmfBm (ML stands for “maximum likelihood” and fBm stands for “fractal Brownian motion”) has the ability to better adapt to real image texture content compared with other methods relying on universal similarity measures such as mutual information or normalized correlation. The main benefits are observed when assumptions underlying the fBm model are fully satisfied, e.g., for isotropic normally distributed textures with stationary increments. Experiments on both simulated and real images and for high and weak correlations between registered images show that the \mboxML_\mathrmfBm estimator offers significant improvement compared with other state-of-the-art methods. It reduces translation vector, rotation angle, and scaling factor estimation errors by a factor of about 1.75–2, and it decreases the probability of false match by up to five times. In addition, an accurate confidence interval for \mboxML_\mathrmfBm estimates can be obtained from the Cramér–Rao lower bound on rotation-scaling-translation parameter estimation error. This bound depends on texture roughness, noise level in reference and template images, correlation between these images, and geometrical transformation parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A set of Fisher information properties are presented in order to draw a parallel with similar properties of Shannon differential entropy. Already known properties are presented together with new ones, which include: (i) a generalization of mutual information for Fisher information; (ii) a new proof that Fisher information increases under conditioning; (iii) showing that Fisher information decreases in Markov chains; and (iv) bound estimation error using Fisher information. This last result is especially important, because it completes Fano's inequality, i.e., a lower bound for estimation error, showing that Fisher information can be used to define an upper bound for this error. In this way, it is shown that Shannon's differential entropy, which quantifies the behavior of the random variable, and the Fisher information, which quantifies the internal structure of the density function that defines the random variable, can be used to characterize the estimation error. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]