The Congealing Page


What is congealing?

Congealing is an algorithm for the joint alignment of a set of images. This notion of "alignment" can be construed very broadly. It includes various types of spatial alignment, aligning images under, say, rotation and translation. But it can also refer to the removal of other forms of non-spatial variability, like brightness transformations, that make a set of images different.

Congealing demo code.

You can download code for congealing. This code runs congealing on a set of handwritten zeros. I hope to put more comprehensive code on the web at some point, but this will let you see how it works.

Congealing download 1.0: Tar ball

Congealing Papers

The following publications are related to congealing.

My own papers:

Erik Learned-Miller, (2005) Data driven image models through continuous joint alignment. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI), 28:2, pp. 236-250, 2006.

(Best Paper Award) Lilla Zollei, Erik Learned-Miller, Eric Grimson and William Wells, (2005) Efficient population registration of 3D data. Workshop on Computer Vision for Biomedical Image Applications: Current Techniques and Future Trends, at the International Conference of Computer Vision (ICCV).

Erik Miller, Nick Matsakis and Paul Viola, (2000) Learning from one example through shared densities on transforms. Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Vol. 1, pp. 464-471.

Erik Learned-Miller and Vidit Jain, (2005) Many heads are better than one: Jointly removing bias from multiple MRs using nonparametric maximum likelihood. Proceedings of Information Processing in Medical Imaging, pp. 615-626, 2005.

Erik Learned-Miller and Parvez Ahammad, (2004) Joint MRI bias removal using entropy minimization across images. NIPS, 2004.

Erik G. Miller, (Feb., 2002) Ph.D. Thesis: Learning from One Example in Machine Vision by Sharing Probability Densities. Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Additional papers:

A. Vedaldi and S. Soatto. A rate-distortion approach to joint pattern alignment. Neural Information Processing Systems 19, 2006.

Parvez Ahammad, Cyrus Harmon, Ann Hammonds, Shankar Sastry and Gerald Rubin, (2005) Joint nonparametric alignment for analyzing spatial gene expression patterns of drosophila imaginal discs. Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2005.


Congealing Movies

This movie shows a set of threes from the NIST database being congealed. (12 Megabytes).


This movie shows a set of sevens being congealed. (12 Megabytes)



Congealing Images

Move your mouse over the images below to see the results of congealing on the images.

Congealing
Congealing
This set of images is a set of infant MR images before bias correction.
MR Bias Correction


This set of images is the same set of infant MR images after our bias correction method.
MR Bias Correction


Finally, the set below is a set that have been corrected using a single image method. Notice the repression of the developing white matter in the mid-brain (butterfly-like shapes).
MR Bias Correction


What if I have other questions about congealing?

If you have questions about congelaing, please email me at
elm"at"cs"dot"umass"dot"edu