Improvement of automated image stitching system for DR X-ray images

The full bone structure of X-ray images cannot be captured in a single scan with Digital radiography (DR) system. The stitching method of X-ray images is very important for scoliosis or lower limb malformation diagnosing and pre-surgical planning. Based on the image registration technology, this paper proposes a new automated image stitching method for full-spine and lower limb X-ray images. The stitching method utilized down-sampling to decrease the size of image and reduce the amount of computation; improved phase correlation algorithm was adopted to find the overlapping region; correlation coefficient was used to evaluate the similarity of overlapping region; weighted blending is brought in to produce a panorama image. The performance of the proposed method was evaluated by 40 pairs of images from patients with scoliosis or lower limb malformation. The stitching method was fully automated without any user input required. The experimental results were compared with previous methods by analyzing the same database. It is demonstrated that the improved phase correlation has higher accuracy and shorter average stitching time than previous methods. It could tackle problems including image translation, rotation and small overlapping in image stitching.