Simultaneous geometric--iconic registration.

In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to bridge the gap between the landmark-based and the iconic-based voxel-wise registration methods. The registration problem is formulated with the use of Markov Random Field theory resulting in a discrete objective function consisting of thee parts. The first part of the energy accounts for the iconic-based volumetric registration problem while the second one for establishing geometrically meaningful correspondences by optimizing over a set of automatically generated mutually salient candidate pairs of points. The last part of the energy penalizes locally the difference between the dense deformation field due to the iconic-based registration and the implied displacements due to the obtained correspondences. Promising results in real MR brain data demonstrate the potentials of our approach.