A registration method for IR images: Preserving the thermal breast characteristics

This paper examines infrared image registration applied to human breast. The main aspect of the paper is the use of specific characteristics of these examinations that are important on diagnosis and have not been applied properly yet. The approach considers that the subject presents 3D degrees of freedom for movement and its correction by 3 types of transformations are compared by several image similarity metrics (Mean Squares, Normalized Correlation, Mutual Information and Normalized Mutual Information). Moreover, this evaluation allows considering clinically relevant factors (i.e. the ability to detect abnormalities in image pairs and its physiological correctness). Furthermore, we study the number of iterations for convergence of each type of function used in the registration algorithms and a ground truth is published for validation purposes.