Elastic registration of electrophoresis images using intensity information and point landmarks

摘要

A key technique for protein analysis is the geometric alignment of gel electrophoresis images. While in previous work either intensity- or landmark-based approaches have been used for the registration of electrophoresis images, we here introduce a scheme incorporating both intensity and landmark information. With this approach, point landmarks are localized using a model fitting scheme and this geometric information is combined with intensity information for elastic image registration. By experiments on the basis of electrophoresis images of different levels of complexity, we demonstrate that the intensity information alone is generally not sufficient to accurately register corresponding images. However, it turns out that the incorporation of landmarks significantly improves the registration accuracy. This is supported by quantitative results.