Registration of Digital Images

In the last few years, the Cultural Heritage field has posed its attention over image processing techniques, in particular for the diagnostic of art works. Many different images of the same painting are taken, in different parts of the light spectrum; these different images have to be fused together, to get an augmented image showing much more details and information which are only visible in some subparts of the spectrum singularly. In this paper, we pose the attention over the compulsory step accomplished just before the “fusion" of such images, i.e. the registration step; in particular, we present an automatic registration technique, based on the computation of mutual information. By means of the registration, it is possible to exactly align the different images, which is the preliminary step to obtain a useful and correct augmented image. These techniques can be also applied to other areas, and in particular to remote sensing images.