  The comparison of images is an important task in image processing. For a
comparison of two images, a variety of measures has been suggested. However,
applications such as dynamic imaging or serial sectioning provide a series of
many images to be compared. When these images are to be registered, the
standard approach is to sequentially align the j-th image with respect to its
neighbours and sweep with respect to j. One of the disadvantages is that
information is distributed only locally. We introduce an alternative so-called
SqN approach. SqN is based on the Schatten-q-norm of the image sequence
gradients, i.e. rank information of image gradients of the whole image
sequence. With this approach, information is transported globally. Our
experiments show that SqN gives at least comparable registration results to
standard distance measures but its computation is about six times faster.
