Motion of the heart during contrast enhancement is modeled at two hierarchical levels: global translation and local deformation. Large-scale, i.e., global, translational motion is identified using global template matching, while the local deformation of a portion of the object (e.g., the left ventricle where the object is a heart) is obtained using an adaptive local template matching scheme which adapts to the local edge distributions by varying the height and the width of the template as well as the location of the template followed by spatial regularization. To address the difficulty of rapid intensity changes across the image sequence as the contrast agent perfuse into the tissue, an edge-based similarity measure is used for template matching.