Rigid Registration of Monomodal and Multimodal Images for Wood Pieces Analysis

This article shows a comparison of rigid image registration methods of monomodal and multimodal images. These methods are applied on different images of oak wood pieces. The work presented in this article is a part of a complete vision system which aims to analyze the visual and physicochemical aspect of oak wood piece surface. In this context, a multi-sensor acquisition using a multimodal imagery platform is performed. The acquired images are not superimposable due to the rigid deformations resulting from the use of different sensor scanners and the presence of imperfections during the image acquisition process. This leads to consider image registration as a preprocessing step. The efficiency of the registration method depends on the deformation itself and the type of image to be registered. That is why we propose a comparison of different built-in and extended MATLAB registration methods, based on cross-correlation, phase correlation, mutual information and alignment of geometric primitives. The registration evaluation of the different methods is done by using quantitative measure of image alignment, visual inspection and computational time. Finally, the choice of the most adapted image registration methods, based on the existing differences between the acquired images, in terms of type of deformations and image modality, is discussed.