Fuzzy-entropy based image congealing

Group-wise image alignment or image congealing is an image processing technique which allows the joint alignment of a collection of images. Typically, information theoretic metrics have been employed as the objective function for the assessment of the process of alignment of the images for such methods. However, these objective functions rely on their probabilistic foundations and cannot model the underlying vagueness or uncertainty that is captured by approaches such as those based on fuzzy sets. In this paper a novel fuzzy-entropy based approach is presented for the task of image congealing. This approach allows for much flexibility in terms of employing different definitions for both similarity and fuzzy-entropy. Indeed, the existing approach for image congealing is subsumed as a special case of the approach proposed in this paper. The novel fuzzy-entropy congealing technique is applied to different benchmark problems and also to a medical imaging dataset with good results.