Elastic registration of gel electrophoresis images based on landmarks and intensities

A key technique for protein analysis is the geometric alignment of gel electrophoresis images. While in previous work either intensity-based or landmark-based approaches have been used for the registration of electrophoresis images, we here introduce a scheme incorporating both intensities and landmarks. With this approach point landmarks are localized using a model fitting scheme and this geometric information is combined with intensity information for elastic registration. By experiments on the basis of images of different levels of complexity we demonstrate that intensity information alone is generally not sufficient for accurate registration. However, it turns out that the incorporation of landmarks significantly improves the registration accuracy.