Robust, fast and accurate: a 3-step method for automatic histological image registration
This work addresses the need for efficient and precise image registration in histology, which is incremental as it builds on existing methods like NGF distance measures.
The paper tackled the problem of registering differently stained histological serial sections by developing a 3-step pipeline, achieving robust error reduction in 99.6% of cases, a fast runtime of 4 seconds, and accurate median relative target registration error of 0.19%.
We present a 3-step registration pipeline for differently stained histological serial sections that consists of 1) a robust pre-alignment, 2) a parametric registration computed on coarse resolution images, and 3) an accurate nonlinear registration. In all three steps the NGF distance measure is minimized with respect to an increasingly flexible transformation. We apply the method in the ANHIR image registration challenge and evaluate its performance on the training data. The presented method is robust (error reduction in 99.6% of the cases), fast (runtime 4 seconds) and accurate (median relative target registration error 0.19%).