Registration of serial images plays an important role in clinical research

diagnosis therapy and evaluation in medicine. A novel method used for serial image registration is proposed in this paper

which is based on the joint histogram of the two images to be registered. Usually

it is very easy

simply with a properly selected threshold

to segment human tissue from the background in medical images. With the thresholds of the two image sets to be registered

the joint histogram is divided into four separate regions. The configuration of the joint histogram bears a greatly different appearance between the before registered and after registered images. This difference appearance reflects the degree of the registration. The criterion function is defined as counting in a specific region or several regions of the joint histogram

which simplifies the computation complexity greatly and speeds up the alignment process significantly. With the fine property of the criterion function

powell's direction set method in multi dimensions is chosen to carry out the optimizing process to calculate the registration parameters. The comparison of the results from both mutual information and our method shows that the new method based on segmentation and counting is a fast

simple

efficient and accurate registration method.