Wavelet based free-form deformations for nonrigid registration

In nonrigid registration, deformations may take place on the coarse and fine scales. For the conventional B-splines based free-form deformation (FFD) registration, these coarse- and fine-scale deformations are all represented by basis functions of a single scale. Meanwhile, wavelets have been proposed as a signal representation suitable for multi-scale problems. Wavelet analysis leads to a unique decomposition of a signal into its coarse- and fine-scale components. Potentially, this could therefore be useful for image registration. In this work, we investigate whether a wavelet-based FFD model has advantages for nonrigid image registration. We use a B-splines based wavelet, as defined by Cai and Wang.1 This wavelet is expressed as a linear combination of B-spline basis functions. Derived from the original B-spline function, this wavelet is smooth, differentiable, and compactly supported. The basis functions of this wavelet are orthogonal across scales in Sobolev space. This wavelet was previously used for registration in computer vision, in 2D optical flow problems,2 but it was not compared with the conventional B-spline FFD in medical image registration problems. An advantage of choosing this B-splines based wavelet model is that the space of allowable deformation is exactly equivalent to that of the traditional B-spline. The wavelet transformation is essentially a (linear) reparameterization of the B-spline transformation model. Experiments on 10 CT lung and 18 T1-weighted MRI brain datasets show that wavelet based registration leads to smoother deformation fields than traditional B-splines based registration, while achieving better accuracy.