A novel variational model for deformable multi-modal image registration is presented in this work. As an alternative to the models based on maximizing mutual information, the Renyi's statistical dependence measure of two random variables is proposed as a measure of the goodness of matching in our objective functional. The proposed model does  not require an estimation of the continuous joint probability density function, which is sensitive to the quantization  of the intensities. Instead, it only deals with observed independent samples. Moreover, the theory for reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces is used to simplify the computation. Experimental results with comparisons are provided to show the effectiveness of the model.