title: LittleQuickWarp: an ultrafast image warping tool.
abstract: Warping images into a standard coordinate space is critical for many image computing related tasks. However, for multi-dimensional and high-resolution images, an accurate warping operation itself is often very expensive in terms of computer memory and computational time. For high-throughput image analysis studies such as brain mapping projects, it is desirable to have high performance image warping tools that are compatible with common image analysis pipelines. In this article, we present LittleQuickWarp, a swift and memory efficient tool that boosts 3D image warping performance dramatically and at the same time has high warping quality similar to the widely used thin plate spline (TPS) warping. Compared to the TPS, LittleQuickWarp can improve the warping speed 2-5 times and reduce the memory consumption 6-20 times. We have implemented LittleQuickWarp as an Open Source plug-in program on top of the Vaa3D system (http://vaa3d.org). The source code and a brief tutorial can be found in the Vaa3D plugin source code repository.
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory of Intelligent Computation & Signal Processing, Ministry of Education, Anhui University, Hefei, China; Janelia Farm Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Ashburn, VA, USA.
authors.forename: Lei
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Qu
authors.affiliation: Janelia Farm Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Ashburn, VA, USA; Allen Institute for Brain Science, WA, USA. Electronic address: hanchuanp@alleninstitute.org.
authors.forename: Hanchuan
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Peng
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001921:Brain / Q000033:anatomy & histology*; D001931:Brain Mapping / Q000379:methods*; D004330:Drosophila; D006801:Humans; D007089:Image Enhancement / Q000379:methods*; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D021621:Imaging, Three-Dimensional / Q000379:methods*; D013997:Time Factors
keywords: B-spline; Image registration; Thin plate spline; Warping