Approximated curvature penalty in non-rigid registration using pairwise MRFs

Labeling of discrete Markov Random Fields (MRFs) has become an attractive approach for solving the problem of non-rigid image registration. Here, regularization plays an important role in order to obtain smooth deformations for the inherent ill-posed problem. Smoothness is achieved by penalizing the derivatives of the displacement field. However, efficient optimization strategies (based on iterative graph-cuts) are only available for second-order MRFs which contain cliques of size up to two. Higher-order cliques require graph modifications and insertion of auxiliary nodes, while pairwise interactions actually allow only regularization based on the first-order derivatives. In this paper, we propose an approximated curvature penalty using second-order derivatives defined on the MRF pairwise potentials. In our experiments, we demonstrate that our approximated term has similar properties as higher-order approaches (invariance to linear transformations), while the computational efficiency of pairwise models is preserved.