Shape-constrained Gaussian process regression for surface reconstruction and multimodal, non-rigid image registration.

We present a new statistical framework for landmark ?>curve-based image registration and surface reconstruction. The proposed method first elastically aligns geometric features (continuous, parameterized curves) to compute local deformations, and then uses a Gaussian random field model to estimate the full deformation vector field as a spatial stochastic process on the entire surface or image domain. The statistical estimation is performed using two different methods: maximum likelihood and Bayesian inference via Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampling. The resulting deformations accurately match corresponding curve regions while also being sufficiently smooth over the entire domain. We present several qualitative and quantitative evaluations of the proposed method on both synthetic and real data. We apply our approach to two different tasks on real data: (1) multimodal medical image registration, and (2) anatomical and pottery surface reconstruction.