The estimation of probabilistic deformable template models incomputer vision or of probabilistic atlases in Computational Anatomyare core issues in both fields.A first coherent statistical framework where the geometrical variability ismodelled as a hiddenrandom variable has been given by [S. Allassonnière et al., J. Roy. Stat. Soc.69 (2007) 3–29]. They introduce a Bayesian approach and mixture of them to estimate deformable template models.A consistent stochastic algorithm has been introduced in [S. Allassonnière et al. (in revision)] to face the problem encountered in [S. Allassonnière et al., J. Roy. Stat. Soc.69 (2007) 3–29] for theconvergence of the estimation algorithm for the one component model inthe presence of noise.We propose here to go on in this direction of using some “SAEM-like”algorithm to approximate the MAP estimator in the general Bayesian setting ofmixture of deformable template models.We also prove the convergence of our algorithm toward a criticalpoint of the penalised likelihood of the observations andillustrate this with handwritten digit images and medical images.
