Protein image alignment via piecewise affine transformations.

We present a new approach for aligning families of 2D gels. Instead of choosing one of the gels as reference and performing a pairwise alignment, we construct an ideal gel that is representative of the entire family and obtain a set of piecewise affine transformations that optimally align each gel of the family to the ideal gel. The coefficients defining the transformations as well as the ideal landmarks are obtained as the solution of a large-scale quadratic programming problem that can be solved efficiently by interior-point methods.