Automated Mosaicking of Medical x-ray Images using SIFT Algorithm

Abstract

Image registration is a process of joining any number of images that have similar overlapping regions of the same scene in order to make a panoramic image. In the field of medical, multimedia, and image processing applications image registration process stands challenging. The work presented here on medical images can be applicable for long limb operations and scoliosis operations. Traditional x-ray machines produce a single frame of x-ray image containing a portion of the body part, but they can not generate a large view of body x-ray image in a single frame. This problem can be solved by creating panoramic images by combining multiple images. The work proposed in this paper can automatically produce panoramic x-ray images by stitching multiple x-ray images. The proposed work uses scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) for mosaicking x-ray images as a local feature point extractor which uses the difference of Gaussian (DOG) and invariant to orientation and scale. Based on the location relationship of x-ray images, random sample consensus (RANSAC) is incorporated to remove the effect of mismatched point pairs in x-ray images and to generate the panoramic view. The performance of the system is computed by using structural and time constraint parameters and is compared with different feature detection techniques. The experimental results show that combing SIFT and RANSAC yields less processing time with an increase in similarity measures.