Feature-based registration for correlative light and electron microscopy images

Abstract

In this paper we present a feature-based registration algorithm for largely misaligned bright-field light microscopy images and transmission electron microscopy images. We first detect cell centroids, using a gradient-based single-pass voting algorithm. Images are then aligned by finding the flip, translation and rotation parameters, which maximizes the overlap between pseudo-cell-centers. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, by comparing it to manually aligned images. Combining registered light and electron microscopy images together can reveal details about cellular structure with spatial and high-resolution information.