ITK registration optimizer scaling, offset and step length

The recommendation for the scaling of translation parameters
versus rotation parameter is to use a factor proportional to
the diagonal length of the image.

For your case the, you have 100 pixels with 1 mm / pixel,
therefore the physical extent of your image is

        100mm  X  100mm  X 100mm

The diagonal the image bounding box is

          sqrt(3) * 100 mm

which is about

              173.2

and extra factor of 10X is usually useful, so you should
probably try a factor of


     1.0 / ( 10 x 173.2 )  =  1.0 / 1732.0

You could use this same factor for the three components
of the translation or you could estimate independent
factor for each component in the way it is done in the
VolView plugin.

Note that this factors are not expected to be computed
precisely. Their purpose is simply to bring the rotational
and translational parameters to a similar numerical scale.

By default, they are quite disproportionate since rotation
are in radians, therefore in a range about -1:1, while
translations are in millimeters, and for an image of 100mm
you probably can expect translations as large as 50mm.


The difference between Offset and Translation is relevant
only for the "Centered" transforms.  For example, for the
case of the CenteredAffineTransform the full transformation
is given by


           P' = R x ( P - C ) + ( C + T )

where

   C  is the Center of rotation
   P  is the point to be transformed
   P' is the transformed point
   T  is the translation.


This equation can be rewritten as

        P' =   R x P     +     [ C + T - R X C ]

and we call Offset the expression

      Offset = [ C + T - R X C ]

so the transformation is

       P'  =  R x P  + Offset

So, the relationship between Translation and offset is


      Offset =  [ I - R ] x C    +    T


In practice, if you are using Centered transform, you should
not care about the Offset. Instead make sure that you provide
appropriate values for the Center of Rotation and the Translation.
The Offset is computed from these two and the rotation matrix.



Note that the step length is also a critical value.
There is no magic recipe for selecting one. You probably
want to start experimenting with a small value (e.g. 0.01)
and plot the metric evaluations during the registration
process.  If you observe that the metric values are fairly
monotonic, that means that you can safely increment the
step length. Such an increment has the advantage of reducing
the time required to reach an extrema of the cost function
(the image metric in this case).   You could restart the
registration with larger values of the step length, as long
as you don't observe a noisy and/or erratic behavior on the
Metric values.