Systems, methods, and computer readable media to register images in real-time and that are capable of producing reliable registrations even when the number of high frequency image features is small. The disclosed techniques may also provide a quantitative measure of a registration's quality. The latter may be used to inform the user and/or to automatically determine when visual registration techniques may be less accurate than motion sensor-based approaches. When such a case is detected, an image capture device may be automatically switched from visual-based to sensor-based registration. Disclosed techniques quickly determine indicators of an image's overall composition (row and column projections) which may be used to determine the translation of a first image, relative to a second image. The translation so determined may be used to align/register the two images.