Non-parametric diffeomorphic image registration with the demons algorithm

We propose a non-parametric diffeomorphic image registration algorithm based on Thirion's demons algorithm. The demons algorithm can be seen as an optimization procedure on the entire space of displacement fields. The main idea of our algorithm is to adapt this procedure to a space of diffeomorphic transformations. In contrast to many diffeomorphic registration algorithms, our solution is computationally efficient since in practice it only replaces an addition of free form deformations by a few compositions. Our experiments show that in addition to being diffeomorphic, our algorithm provides results that are similar to the ones from the demons algorithm but with transformations that are much smoother and closer to the true ones in terms of Jacobians.