Image registration is an important tool for medical image analysis and is used to bring images into the same reference frame by warping the coordinate field of one image, such that some similarity measure is minimized. We study similarity in image registration in the context of Locally Orderless Images (LOI), which is the natural way to study density estimates and reveals the 3 fundamental scales: the measurement scale, the intensity scale, and the integration scale. This paper has three main contributions: Firstly, we rephrase a large set of popular similarity measures into a common framework, which we refer to as Locally Orderless Registration, and which makes full use of the features of local histograms. Secondly, we extend the theoretical understanding of the local histograms. Thirdly, we use our framework to compare two state-of-the-art intensity density estimators for image registration: The Parzen Window (PW) and the Generalized Partial Volume (GPV), and we demonstrate their differences on a popular similarity measure, Normalized Mutual Information (NMI). We conclude, that complicated similarity measures such as NMI may be evaluated almost as fast as simple measures such as Sum of Squared Distances (SSD) regardless of the choice of PW and GPV. Also, GPV is an asymmetric measure, and PW is our preferred choice.

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