Shape Registration in Implicit Spaces using Information Theory and Free Form Deformations

We present a novel variational and statistical approach for shape registration. Shapes of interest are implicitly embedded in a higher dimensional space of distance transforms. In this implicit embedding space, registration is formulated in a hierarchical manner: the Mutual Information criterion supports various transformation models and is optimized to perform global registration; then a B-spline based Incremental Free Form Deformations (IFFD) model is used to minimize a Sum-of-Squared-Differences (SSD) measure and further recover a dense local non-rigid registration field. The key advantage of such framework is twofold: (1) it naturally deals with shapes of arbitrary dimension (2D, 3D or higher) and arbitrary topology (multiple parts, closed/open), and (2) it preserves shape topology during local deformation, and produces local registration fields that are smooth, continuous and establish one-to-one correspondences. Its invariance to initial conditions is evaluated through empirical validation, and various hard 2D/3D geometric shape registration examples are used to show its robustness to noise, severe occlusion and missing parts. We demonstrate the power of the proposed framework using two applications: one for statistical modeling of anatomical structures, another for 3D face scan registration and expression tracking. We also compare the performance of our algorithm with that of several other well-known shape registration algorithms. Index Terms shape registration, mutual information, free form deformations, correspondences, implicit shape representation, distance transforms, partial differential equation