3D Gabor wavelets for evaluating SPM normalization algorithm.

A Gabor wavelets based method is proposed in this paper for evaluating and tuning the parameters of image registration algorithms. We propose a 3D local anatomical structure descriptor, namely the Maximum Responded Gabor Wavelet (MRGW), for measuring registration quality based on anatomical variability of registered images. The effectiveness of the descriptor is demonstrated through a practical application, using the variance of MRGW response to tune parameters of a nonlinear spatial normalization algorithm, which is part of the popular software package for medical image processing - the Statistical Parametric Mapping (SPM).