cross-correlation for image registration

[Matt Nicholas]

Hello list,
I'm a reasonably experienced MATLAB user who is trying to move to 
Octave. One task I frequently need to perform is image registration via 
cross correlation, which I used to do in MATLAB using the normxcorr2. 
Basically, I found the index of the maximum value in the correlation 
matrix, subtracted the width and height of the template image from these 
coordinates, and this gave me the shift of the template relative to the 
test image.  I have tried using xcorr2 in Octave with the 'coeff' flag, 
but the results are not what I would expect, and not very similar to 
normxcorr2 for the same images in MATLAB (to be honest, I am not 
terribly surprised, because for some reason I was never able to get this 
to work with xcorr2 in MATLAB either, but I simply switched to 
normxcorr2 years ago and forgot about it). So I am a little stuck. I've 
seen some previous discussion of this topic, with one user even offering 
to write an Octave version of normxcorr2, but it doesn't seem to have 
come to completion.

Just to be clear, this is not a complaint that normxcorr2 is 'missing' 
in Octave. I am happy to change my approach if I can achieve similar 
results with another method. Since it's a common task, I figured I would 
ask for suggestions before trying to reinvent the wheel. Is there some 
appropriate method of normalizing the output of xcorr2 to achieve what I 
want? Honestly, I doubt this is a normalization issue, since the maximum 
value in the correlation matrix is not *located* where I would expect 
(regardless of its absolute magnitude). So a related question might be, 
does anyone know the difference between xcorr2 and normxcorr2 in MATLAB?

Many thanks in advance for your help,
Matt