Benchmarking of Image Registration Methods for Differently Stained Histological Slides

Abstract

Image registration is a common task for many biomedical analysis applications. The present work focuses on the benchmarking of registration methods on differently stained histological slides. This is a challenging task due to the differences in the appearance model, the repetitive texture of the details and the large image size, between other issues. Our benchmarking data is composed of 616 image pairs at two different scales - average image diagonal 2.4k and 5k pixels. We compare eleven fully automatic registration methods covering the widely used similarity measures (and optimization strategies with both linear and elastic transformation). For each method, the best parameter configuration is found and subsequently applied to all the image pairs. The performance of the algorithms is evaluated from several perspectives - the registrations (in)accuracy on manually annotated landmarks, the method robustness and its processing computation time.