GRASP and path relinking hybridizations for the point matching‐based image registration problem

In the last decade, image registration has proven to be a very active research area when tackling computer vision problems, especially in medical applications. In general, image registration methods aim to find a transformation between two images taken under different conditions. Point matching is an image registration approach based on searching for the right pairing of points between the two images, which involves a combinatorial optimization problem. From this matching, the registration transformation can be inferred by means of numerical methods. In this paper, we tackle the medical image registration problem by means of a recent hybrid metaheuristic composed of two well‐known optimization methods: GRASP and path relinking. Several designs based on this new hybrid approach have been tested. Our experimentation with real‐world problems shows the combination of GRASP and evolutionary path relinking performs well when compared to previous state‐of‐the‐art image registration approaches adopting both the point matching and transformation parameter approaches.