Further analysis of interpolation effects in mutual information-based image registration.

This paper presents an analysis of the mutual information (MI) metric in rigid-body registration of two digital images, in particular, local fluctuations of the MI value due to interpolation. In contrast to existing work in this area, this paper starts with two hypothetical continuous images, based on which both sampling and interpolation effects are analyzed. This analysis indicates that an "ideal" interpolator may not be able to completely suppress the undesirable local minima of the MI metric if the sampling effect is not negligible. Several preprocessing methods are discussed for reducing the interpolation effects.