Patent ID: 8194952

Claim:
An image processing and feature alignment system to align skin features between corresponding images comprising a reference image and a later-captured image, the system comprising: a pre-warp processing module to align body outlines of the corresponding images based on curvatures; and a precision alignment and registration module to; generate an initial displacement flowfield map based on the aligned body outlines for application to a filtered version of the later-captured image to generate a pre-warped image; divide the pre-warped image and the reference image into a plurality of overlapping chips after body outline alignment; extract chip-pairs from corresponding chips of the pre-warped image and the reference image; perform a correlation between the extracted chip-pairs to estimate an offset for each chip-pair based on a correlation peak for use in generating an updated displacement flowfield map; repeat the extraction of chips-pairs, the offset estimation and the generation of the updated displacement flowfield map for successively smaller sized chips; and generate a pixel-to-pixel spatial coordinate transformation map to align skin features between the corresponding images based a final updated displacement flowfield map.