Intensity-based matching and registration for 3D correlative microscopy with large discrepancies

Correlative microscopy, especially light and electron microscopy (CLEM), enables the study of cells and subcellular elements in complementary ways, provided a reliable registration between images is efficiently achievable. We propose a general automatic registration method. Due to large discrepancies in appearance, field-of-view, resolution and position, a pre-alignment stage is required before any 3D fine registration stage. We define an intensity-based method for both stages, which leverages a common representation of the two involved image modalities. We report experimental results on different real datasets of 3D correlative microscopy, demonstrating time efficiency and overlay accuracy.