Automated registration for augmenting micro-CT 3D images

Abstract

Micro-ct imaging allows probing of material 3D structure down to the micrometre scale. However, often there exists structure at the sub-micrometre scale which significantly inuences the macrophysical properties of the material. One possible solution for mitigating this micro-CT resolution limitation is to incorporate information from higher resolution Back-scattered Scanning Electron Microscopy (bsem) imaging techniques. A first step toward incorporating this high resolution data into micro-ct models is to align the bsem 2D image(s) with the corresponding region(s) of the micro-CT 3D image. This article presents an automated multi-start multi-resolution parallel registration algorithm which has been successfully used to achieve accurate alignment of bsem and micro-ct image pairs.