Unsupervised Deformable Image Registration with Structural Nonparametric Smoothing

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhang, Hang, Chen, Xiang, Hu, Renjiu, Wang, Rongguang, Zhang, Jinwei, Liu, Min, Wang, Yaonan, Li, Gaolei, Cheng, Xinxing, Duan, Jinming
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zhang, Hang
Chen, Xiang
Hu, Renjiu
Wang, Rongguang
Zhang, Jinwei
Liu, Min
Wang, Yaonan
Li, Gaolei
Cheng, Xinxing
Duan, Jinming
author_facet Zhang, Hang
Chen, Xiang
Hu, Renjiu
Wang, Rongguang
Zhang, Jinwei
Liu, Min
Wang, Yaonan
Li, Gaolei
Cheng, Xinxing
Duan, Jinming
contents Learning-based deformable image registration (DIR) accelerates alignment by amortizing traditional optimization via neural networks. Label supervision further enhances accuracy, enabling efficient and precise nonlinear alignment of unseen scans. However, images with sparse features amid large smooth regions, such as retinal vessels, introduce aperture and large-displacement challenges that unsupervised DIR methods struggle to address. This limitation occurs because neural networks predict deformation fields in a single forward pass, leaving fields unconstrained post-training and shifting the regularization burden entirely to network weights. To address these issues, we introduce SmoothProper, a plug-and-play neural module enforcing smoothness and promoting message passing within the network's forward pass. By integrating a duality-based optimization layer with tailored interaction terms, SmoothProper efficiently propagates flow signals across spatial locations, enforces smoothness, and preserves structural consistency. It is model-agnostic, seamlessly integrates into existing registration frameworks with minimal parameter overhead, and eliminates regularizer hyperparameter tuning. Preliminary results on a retinal vessel dataset exhibiting aperture and large-displacement challenges demonstrate our method reduces registration error to 1.88 pixels on 2912x2912 images, marking the first unsupervised DIR approach to effectively address both challenges. The source code will be available at https://github.com/tinymilky/SmoothProper.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_10813
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Unsupervised Deformable Image Registration with Structural Nonparametric Smoothing
Zhang, Hang
Chen, Xiang
Hu, Renjiu
Wang, Rongguang
Zhang, Jinwei
Liu, Min
Wang, Yaonan
Li, Gaolei
Cheng, Xinxing
Duan, Jinming
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Image and Video Processing
Signal Processing
Learning-based deformable image registration (DIR) accelerates alignment by amortizing traditional optimization via neural networks. Label supervision further enhances accuracy, enabling efficient and precise nonlinear alignment of unseen scans. However, images with sparse features amid large smooth regions, such as retinal vessels, introduce aperture and large-displacement challenges that unsupervised DIR methods struggle to address. This limitation occurs because neural networks predict deformation fields in a single forward pass, leaving fields unconstrained post-training and shifting the regularization burden entirely to network weights. To address these issues, we introduce SmoothProper, a plug-and-play neural module enforcing smoothness and promoting message passing within the network's forward pass. By integrating a duality-based optimization layer with tailored interaction terms, SmoothProper efficiently propagates flow signals across spatial locations, enforces smoothness, and preserves structural consistency. It is model-agnostic, seamlessly integrates into existing registration frameworks with minimal parameter overhead, and eliminates regularizer hyperparameter tuning. Preliminary results on a retinal vessel dataset exhibiting aperture and large-displacement challenges demonstrate our method reduces registration error to 1.88 pixels on 2912x2912 images, marking the first unsupervised DIR approach to effectively address both challenges. The source code will be available at https://github.com/tinymilky/SmoothProper.
title Unsupervised Deformable Image Registration with Structural Nonparametric Smoothing
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Image and Video Processing
Signal Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10813