Motion estimation using mean field annealing applied to MRI

A novel method for obtaining dense displacement fields from a sequence of frames is presented. The algorithm is based on modeling the displacement field as a Markov random field, hence making it possible to use the equivalence of a Markov random field and a Gibbs distribution. The Gibbs distribution is used to define a mean field probability density function, and the displacement field is found using a mean field annealing algorithm. Mean field annealing is a technique which finds the global or near global minima in nonconvex optimization problems. Analysis of the algorithm and experimental results are presented.<>