Deformable Image Mosaicing for Optical Biopsy

Traditional image mosaicing usually relies on rigid image transformations. In many medical applications, however, tissue deformation during image acquisition or 3D parallax effects may require nonrigid transformations in the mosaicing process. This paper presents a new method that integrates deformable surface models into the image mosaicing algorithms. Our approach has two main contributions. First, we present a global alignment algorithm to efficiently deal with accumulated image registration errors. Second, we introduce a local alignment algorithm to accommodate local scene deformations. These two problems are integrated into a single optimization problem that simultaneously recovers the motion of the camera as well as the structure of the scene. Our approach is demonstrated on simulations, images from a hand-held digital camera, and microscopic images acquired with a micro-endoscope.