page_title: Image registration
section_title: Applications
hierarchical_section_title: Image registration / Applications
caption_attribution_description: English: mni-autoreg_03-registered.png
context_page_description: Image registration is the process of transforming different sets of data into one coordinate system. Data may be multiple photographs, data from different sensors, times, depths, or viewpoints. It is used in computer vision, medical imaging, military automatic target recognition, and compiling and analyzing images and data from satellites. Registration is necessary in order to be able to compare or integrate the data obtained from these different measurements.
context_section_description: Image registration has applications in remote sensing (cartography updating), and computer vision.  Due to the vast range of applications to which image registration can be applied, it is impossible to develop a general method that is optimized for all uses.
  Medical image registration (for data of the same patient taken at different points in time such as change detection or tumor monitoring) often additionally involves elastic (also known as nonrigid) registration to cope with deformation of the subject (due to breathing, anatomical changes, and so forth). Nonrigid registration of medical images can also be used to register a patient's data to an anatomical atlas, such as the Talairach atlas for neuroimaging.
  In astrophotography image alignment and stacking are often used to increase the signal to noise ratio for faint objects. Without stacking it may be used to produce a timelapse of events such as a planets rotation of a transit across the Sun.  Using control points (automatically or manually entered), the computer performs transformations on one image to make major features align with a second or multiple images. This technique may also be used for images of different sizes, to allow images taken through different telescopes or lenses to be combined.
  In cryo-TEM instability causes specimen drift and many fast acquisitions with accurate image registration is required to preserve high resolution and obtain high signal to noise images. For low SNR data, the best image registration is achieved by cross-correlating all permutations of images in an image stack. 
  Image registration is an essential part of panoramic image creation. There are many different techniques that can be implemented in real time and run on embedded devices like cameras and camera-phones.
caption: Registration of two MRI images of the brain
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