An automated system for the registration and comparison of photographic images in medicine

A system is presented for digitization and automated comparison of photographic images of patients obtained at different times using a high-precision video camera. The images can be acquired either directly or from slides. The two images to be compared are registered using a complex geometrical and gray-level registration model including six parameters (planar, translation, rotation, magnification, linear transformation of the gray levels). The values of the registration parameters are automatically calculated by maximizing an integer similarity measure selected for robustness. The optimization of this function with respect to the registration parameters is performed using an adaptive random search strategy. The analysis of the differences between the registered images can be carried out through visual inspection of the subtraction image in which artifacts due to remaining infrapixel shifts have been suppressed.