# Progressive Retinal Image Registration via Global and Local Deformable Transformations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.01068 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.01068/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [SuperGlue: Learning Feature Matching with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11763/) (2019)
- [Spatial Transformer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02025/) (2015)
- [SuperPoint: Self-Supervised Interest Point Detection and Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.07629/) (2017)
- [VoxelMorph: A Learning Framework for Deformable Medical Image Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.05231/) (2018)
- [Quicksilver: Fast Predictive Image Registration - a Deep Learning Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10908/) (2017)
- [XMorpher: Full Transformer for Deformable Medical Image Registration via Cross Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07349/) (2022)
- [GLAMpoints: Greedily Learned Accurate Match points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06812/) (2019)
- [Semi-Supervised Keypoint Detector and Descriptor for Retinal Image Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07932/) (2022)
- [Learning Deformable Registration of Medical Images with Anatomical Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07183/) (2020)
- [Enhancing Deformable Local Features by Jointly Learning to Detect and Describe Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00583/) (2023)
- [Automated Learning for Deformable Medical Image Registration by Jointly Optimizing Network Architectures and Objective Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06810/) (2022)
- [MOS: A Low Latency and Lightweight Framework for Face Detection, Landmark Localization, and Head Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.10953/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [LiftFeat: 3D Geometry-Aware Local Feature Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03422/) (2025)
- [Unsupervised Deformable Image Registration with Structural Nonparametric Smoothing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10813/) (2025)
- [Unsupervised training of keypoint-agnostic descriptors for flexible retinal image registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.02787/) (2025)
- [Active Diffusion Matching: Score-based Iterative Alignment of Cross-Modal Retinal Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10084/) (2026)
- [Particle Diffusion Matching: Random Walk Correspondence Search for the Alignment of Standard and Ultra-Widefield Fundus Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10085/) (2026)
- [Modality-Invariant Coarse-to-Fine Retinal Image Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.14829/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Retinal image registration plays an important role in the ophthalmological diagnosis process. Since there exist variances in viewing angles and anatomical structures across different retinal images, keypoint-based approaches become the mainstream methods for retinal image registration thanks to their robustness and low latency. These methods typically assume the retinal surfaces are planar, and adopt feature matching to obtain the homography matrix that represents the global transformation between images. Yet, such a planar hypothesis inevitably introduces registration errors since retinal surface is approximately curved. This limitation is more prominent when registering image pairs with significant differences in viewing angles. To address this problem, we propose a hybrid registration framework called HybridRetina, which progressively registers retinal images with global and local deformable transformations. For that, we use a keypoint detector and a deformation network called GAMorph to estimate the global transformation and local deformable transformation, respectively. Specifically, we integrate multi-level pixel relation knowledge to guide the training of GAMorph. Additionally, we utilize an edge attention module that includes the geometric priors of the images, ensuring the deformation field focuses more on the vascular regions of clinical interest. Experiments on two widely-used datasets, FIRE and FLoRI21, show that our proposed HybridRetina significantly outperforms some state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/lyp-deeplearning/awesome-retinal-registration.