FLUID IMAGE REGISTRATION USING A FINITE VOLUME SCHEME OF THE INCOMPRESSIBLE NAVIER STOKES EQUATION

This paper proposes a stable numerical implementation of the Navier-Stokes equations for fluid image registration, based on a finite volume scheme. Although fluid registration methods have succeeded in handling large deformations in various applications, they still suffer from perturbed solutions due to the choice of the numerical implementation. Thus, a robust numerical scheme in the optimization step is required to enhance the quality of the registration. A key challenge is the use of a finite volume-based scheme, since we have to deal with a hyperbolic equation type. We propose the classical Patankar scheme based on pressure correction, which is called Semi-Implicit Method for Pressure-Linked Equation (SIMPLE). The performance of the proposed algorithm was tested on magnetic resonance images of the human brain and hands, and compared with the classical implementation of the fluid image registration [13], in which the authors used a successive overrelaxation in the spatial domain with Euler integration in time to handle the nonlinear viscous. The obtained results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed approach, visually and quantitatively, using the differences between images criteria, PSNR and SSIM measures.