Adaptive Anisotropic Regularization of Deformation Fields for Non-Rigid Registration

Image registration is a crucial task in many applications and applied in a variety of different areas. In addition to the primary task of image alignment, the deformation field is valuable when studying structural/volumetric changes in the brain. In most applications a regularizing term is added to achieve a smoothly varying deformation field. This can sometimes cause conflicts in situations of local complex deformations. In this paper we present a new regularizer, which aims at handling local complex deformations while maintaining an overall smooth deformation field. It is based on an adaptive anisotropic regularizer and its usefulness is demonstrated by two examples, one synthetic and one with real MRI data from a pre- and post-op situation with normal pressure hydrocephalus.