29 September 2021 Intensity-Mosaic: automatic panorama mosaicking of disordered images with insufficient features
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Abstract

Purpose: Handling low-quality and few-feature medical images is a challenging task in automatic panorama mosaicking. Current mosaicking methods for disordered input images are based on feature point matching, whereas in this case intensity-based registration achieves better performance than feature-point registration methods. We propose a mosaicking method that enables the use of mutual information (MI) registration for mosaicking randomly ordered input images with insufficient features.

Approach: Dimensionality reduction is used to map disordered input images into a low dimensional space. Based on the low dimensional representation, the image global correspondence can be recognized efficiently. For adjacent image pairs, we optimize the MI metric for registration. The panorama is then created after image blending. We demonstrate our method on relatively lower-cost handheld devices that acquire images from the retina in vivo, kidney ex vivo, and bladder phantom, all of which contain sparse features.

Results: Our method is compared with three baselines: AutoStitch, “dimension reduction + SIFT,” and “MI-Only.” Our method compared to the first two feature-point based methods exhibits 1.25 (ex vivo microscope dataset) to two times (in vivo retina dataset) rate of mosaic completion, and MI-Only has the lowest complete rate among three datasets. When comparing the subsequent complete mosaics, our target registration errors can be 2.2 and 3.8 times reduced when using the microscopy and bladder phantom datasets.

Conclusions: Using dimensional reduction increases the success rate of detecting adjacent images, which makes MI-based registration feasible and narrows the search range of MI optimization. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first mosaicking method that allows automatic stitching of disordered images with intensity-based alignment, which provides more robust and accurate results when there are insufficient features for classic mosaicking methods.

© 2021 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE) 2329-4302/2021/$28.00 © 2021 SPIE
Chen Gong, Steven L. Brunton, Brian T. Schowengerdt, and Eric J. Seibel "Intensity-Mosaic: automatic panorama mosaicking of disordered images with insufficient features," Journal of Medical Imaging 8(5), 054002 (29 September 2021). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JMI.8.5.054002
Received: 19 January 2021; Accepted: 13 September 2021; Published: 29 September 2021
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CITATIONS
Cited by 3 scholarly publications.
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KEYWORDS
Panoramic photography

Image registration

Retina

Video

Bladder

Dimension reduction

Principal component analysis

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