Registration - Definition and Overview

In computer vision, sets of data acquired by sampling the same scene or object at different times, or from different perspectives, will be in different coordinate systems. Registration is the process of transforming the different sets of data into one coordinate system. Registration is necessary in order to be able to compare or integrate the data obtained from different measurements.

In medical imaging (e.g. for data of the same patient taken at different points in time) registration often additionally involves elastic (or nonrigid) registration to cope with elastic deformations of the body parts imaged.