We study a Riemannian gradient flow on Sobolev diffeomorphisms for the problem of image registration. The energy functional quantifies the effect of transforming a template to a target, while also penalizing non-isometric deformations. The main result is well-posedness of the flow. We also give a geometric description of the gradient in terms of the momentum map.

We study a gradient flow on Sobolev diffeomorphisms for the problem of image registration. The energy functional quantifies the effect of transforming a template to a target, while also penalizing deformation of the metric tensor. The main result is well-posedness of the flow. We also give a geometric description of the gradient in terms of the momentum map.