Using the Local Phase of the Magnitude of the Local Structure Tensor for Image Registration

In some cases the phase based registration will fail as well, for instance when the images to be registered do not only differ in intensity but also in local phase. This is the case if a dark circle in the reference image is a bright circle in the source image. While rigid registration algorithms can use other parts of the image to calculate the global transformation, this problem is harder to solve for non-rigid registration.

The solution that we propose in this work is to use the local phase of the magnitude of the local structure tensor, instead of the local phase of the image intensity. By doing this, we achieve invariance both to the image intensity and to the local phase and thereby only use the structural information, i.e. the shapes of the objects, for registration.