Principles of spatial processing

Try [http://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/spm/doc/books/hbf2/pdfs/Ch2.pdf John Ashburner's realignment chapter] in the [http://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/spm/doc/books/hbf2/ Human Brain Function book] - second edition.

See also the other chapters on "Computational anatomy" in http://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/spm/doc/books/hbf2/ HBF2].

You may get some benefit from the theory pages at the [http://bishopw.loni.ucla.edu/AIR5/index.html AIR website]. AIR is a realignment / coregistration / normalization program written by Roger Woods of UCLA. His pages go into details of the implementation of spatial transforms, some of which are relevant to SPM.