[Insight-developers] Genetic Algoritms for Registration

[Luis Ibanez]

Hi,

We are looking forward to extend the Optimization methods
wrapped for Registration. (the ones in vnl are already done,
though not fully tested).

Among the interesting options to consider we have Genetic 
Algorithms, they are very robust in noisy functions and behave 
well in the presence of local minima.  There are some libraries
already available on the web, that could be interesting to reuse.

A comprehensive site about Genetic Algorithms can be found at:
http://www.aic.nrl.navy.mil/galist/

They have a list of libraries in different languages:
ftp://ftp.aic.nrl.navy.mil/pub/galist/src/index.html

Some of them can satisfy the criteria of being open source,
run on Windows and Unix, and having a reasonable documentation.
For example GAlib at MIT
http://lancet.mit.edu/ga/


One possibility is to add a Directory in

   Code/Interfaces

like :

   Code/Interfaces/GeneticAlgorithms


Then, add a itk::RegistrationOptimizerGeneticAlgorithm 
class that will make the corresponding wrap the particular
library that we choose.

In this way it will be possible to use it with the other 
Registration classes.

Genetic Algorithms have a lot of variants, so probably
a set of wrappers will be convenient.



Does anybody have any preferences on this topic ?


Thanks


Luis