Patent ID: 7409108

Claim:
A method of aligning a pair of images comprising the steps of: providing a pair of images with a first image and a second image, wherein said images comprise a plurality of intensities corresponding to a domain of points in a D-dimensional space, identifying feature points on both images using the same criteria; computing a feature vector for each feature point; measuring a feature dissimilarity for each pair of feature vectors, wherein a first feature vector of each pair is associated with a first feature point on the first image, and a second feature vector of each pair is associated with a second feature point on the second image; determining a correspondence mapping for each pair of feature points using the feature dissimilarity associated with each feature point pair, wherein determining a correspondence mapping for each pair of feature points includes assigning an edge associating every feature vector on the first image to every feature vector on the second image, and assigning a weight to each edge; and defining an image transformation to align the second image with the first image using one or more pairs of feature points that are least dissimilar.