Shape registration problem have been an active research topic in computational geometry, computer vision, medical image analysis and pattern recognition communities. Also called the shape alignment, it has extensive uses in recognition, indexing, retrieval, generation and other downstream analysis of a set of shapes. There have been a variety of works that approach this problem, with the methods varying mostly in terms of (can be called pillars of registration) the shape representation, transformation and registration criteria that is used. One such method is proposed by Huang et al. in this paper, which uses a novel combination of the three pillars, where an implicit shape representation is used to register an object both globally and locally. For the registration criteria, the proposed method uses Mutual Information based criteria for its global registration phase, while sum-squared differences (SSD) for its local phase. 

The method starts off with defining an implicit, non-parameteric shape representation which is translation, rotation and scale invariant. This makes the first step of the registration pipeline which transforms the input images into a domain where the shape is implicitly defined. The image is first partitioned into three spaces, namely $[\Omega]$ (the image domain), $[R_S]$ (points inside the shape), $[\Omega - R_S]$ (points outside the shape), and $[S]$ (points lying on the shape boundary). Using this partition, a function based upon the Lipschitz function $\phi : \Omega -> \mathbb{R}^+$ is defined as:

\begin{equation}
    \phi_S(x,y)
    \begin{cases} 
         0 & (x,y) \in S \\
         + D((x,y), S)>0 & (x,y) \in [R_s] \\
         - D((x,y), S)<0 & (x,y) \in [\Omega - R_s]
    \end{cases}
\end{equation}
    
Where $D((x,y),S)$ is the distance function which gives the minimum Euclidean distance between point $(x,y)$ and the shape $S$. 

Given the implicit representation, global shape alignment is performed using the Mutual Information (MI) objective function defined between the probability density functions of the pixels in source image and the target image sampled from the domain $\Omega$. 

\begin{equation}

MI(f_{\Omega}, g_{\Omega}^{A}) = \underbrace{\mathcal{H}[p^{f_{\Omega}}(l_1)]}_{\substack{\text{Entropy of the}\\ \text{distribution representing $f_{\Omega}$}}} + \underbrace{\mathcal{H}[p^{g_{\Omega}^{A}}(l_2)]}_{\substack{\text{Entropy of the}\\ \text{distribution representing $g_{\Omega}^{A}$} \\ \text{which is the} \\ \text{transformed source ISR using $A(\theta)$}}} - \underbrace{\mathcal{H}[p^{f_{\Omega}, g_{\Omega}^{A}}(l_1, l_2)]}_{\substack{\text{Entropy of the}\\ \text{joint distribution}\\\text{representing $f_{\Omega}, g_{\Omega}^{A}$}}}

\end{equation}

Following global registration, local registration is performed by embedding a control point grid using the Incremental Free Form Deformation (IFFD) method. The objective function to minimize is used as the sum squared differences (SSD). The local registration is also offset by using a multi-resolution framework, which performs deformations on control points of varying resolution, in order to account for small local deformations in the shape. In case where there is prior information available for feature point correspondence between the two shapes, this prior knowledge can be added as a plugin term in the overall local registration optimization term. 

The method was applied on statistically modeling anatomical structures, 3D face scan and mesh registration. 

Image segmentation have been a topic of research in computer vision domain for decades. There have been a multitude of methods proposed for segmentation, but most have been dependent on a high level user input which guides the contour or boundaries towards the real boundaries. In order to come close to a fully automated or partially automated solution, 
a novel method is proposed for performing multilabel,
interactive image segmentation using Random Walk algorithm as the fundamental driver of segmentation. The problem is formulated as follows: given a small number
of pixels with user-defined (or pre-defined) labels, assign the the probability that a random walker starting at each unlabeled pixel will first reach one of the pre-labeled pixels. The current pixel is then assigned the label corresponding to the max of this probability. This leads to high-quality segmentations of an image into $K$ different components. The algorithm is based on image graphs, where image pixels are represented as graphs connected  by edges to its 8-connected neighbours. 

In this paper, a novel approach to $K$-class image
segmentation problem is proposed which utilizes user-defined seeds representing the example regions of the image belonging to $K$ objects. Each seed specifies a location with a user-defined label. The algorithm labels an
unseeded pixel by resolving the question: Given a random
walker starting at this location, what is the probability that it first reaches each of the K seed points? It will be shown
that this calculation may be performed exactly without the
simulation of a random walk. By performing this calculation,
the algorithm assigns a K-tuple vector to each pixel that specifies the probability that a random walker starting from each unseeded pixel will first reach each of the K seed points. A final
segmentation may be derived from these K-tuples by selecting
for each pixel the most probable seed destination for a random
walker.

The graph weights are determined to be a function of the pixel intensities, specifically $w_{ij}$ = $exp(-(g_i - g_j)^2)$. 
The algorithm works by biasing the random walker to avoid crossing sharp intensity gradients, which leads to a quality segmentation that respects object boundaries (including weak boundaries).

The algorithm exposes only one free variable $\beta$, and can be combined with other approaches involving pre- and post-filtering techniques. Additionally, the algorithm provides on-the-fly correction of previous detected boundary in an computationally efficient way.