Coral Reef Optimization for intensity-based medical image registration

Image registration (IR) is an extended and important problem in computer vision. It involves the transformation of different sets of image data having a shared content into a common coordinate system. Specifically, we will deal with the 3D intensity-based medical IR problem where the intensity distribution of the images is considered, one of the most complex and time consuming variants. The limitations of traditional IR methods have boomed the application of evolutionary and metaheuristic-based approaches to solve the problem, aiming to improve the performance of existing methods both in terms of accuracy and efficiency. In this contribution, we consider the use of a recently proposed bio-inspired meta-heuristic: the Coral Reef Optimization Algorithm (CRO). This novel algorithm simulates the natural phenomena underlying a coral reef, where different corals grow, reproduce and fight with other corals for space in the colony. CRO has recently obtained promising results in different real-world applications and we think its operation mode can properly cope with the 3D intensity-based medical IR problem. We adapt the algorithm to the real-coding problem nature and run an experimental setup tackling sixteen real-world problem instances. The new proposal is benchmarked with recent, state-of-the-art IR techniques. The results show that the CRO-based overcomes the state-of-the-art results in terms of its robustness and time efficiency.