Realtime Camera Calibration for Enhanced Reality Visualization

The problem which must be solved to make realtime enhanced reality visualization possible is basically the camera calibration problem. The relationship between the coordinate frames of the patient, the patient’s internal anatomy scans and the image plane of the camera observing the patient must be established. This paper presents a new approach to finding this relationship and develops a system for performing enhanced reality visualization. Given the locations of a few fiducials our method is fully automatic, runs in nearly real-time, is accurate to a fraction of a pixel, allows both patient and camera motion, automatically corrects for changes to the internal camera parameters (focal length, focus, aperture, etc.) and requires only a single video image.