A method for compensating respiratory motion in coronary fluoroscopic images includes finding a set of transformation parameters of a parametric motion model that maximize an objective function that is a weighted normalized cross correlation function of a reference image acquired at a first time that is warped by the parametric motion model and a first incoming image acquired at a second time subsequent to the first time. The weights are calculated as a ratio of a covariance of the gradients of the reference image and the gradients of the first incoming image with respect to a root of a product of a variance of the gradients of the reference image and the variance of the gradients of the first incoming image. The parametric motion model transforms the reference image to match the first incoming image.