Multiple infrared markers based real-time stereo vision positioning system for surgical navigation

This paper studies the development of a real-time stereo vision system to position multiple infrared markers attached to a surgical instrument. A parallel pipeline algorithm in FPGA is developed to recognize the markers in both image planes and give each of them a unique label; the pipeline architecture includes smoothing filter, thresholding, connected component labeling, and centroid extraction. A distortion correction and stereo triangulation method is proposed to position the markers in space, which is carried out by a cross computation mechanism in a dual-core DSP. The proposed system can recognize the 3D coordinates of four infrared markers with a delay of 8.67 ms. Furthermore, it is capable of positioning 80 infrared markers at most without frame dropping. The performance of the proposed system can meet the requirements of applications such as surgical navigation which needs high real time capability.

[1]  Scott L Delp,et al.  Surgical navigation for total knee arthroplasty: a perspective. , 2007, Journal of biomechanics.

[2]  Kenji Suzuki,et al.  Linear-time connected-component labeling based on sequential local operations , 2003, Comput. Vis. Image Underst..

[3]  Dirk Bartz,et al.  A hybrid tracking method for surgical augmented reality , 2007, Comput. Graph..

[4]  Rafael C. González,et al.  Local Determination of a Moving Contrast Edge , 1985, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

[5]  E. R. Davies,et al.  Machine vision - theory, algorithms, practicalities , 2004 .

[6]  L.-P. Nolte,et al.  Simulation of an optical-sensing technique for tracking surgical tools employed in computer-assisted interventions , 2005, IEEE Sensors Journal.

[7]  Nobuhiko Hata,et al.  Surgical navigation by autostereoscopic image overlay of integral videography , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine.

[8]  Chung-Hsien Kuo,et al.  Development of image servo tracking robot for the surgical space positioning system , 2004, 2004 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics (IEEE Cat. No.04CH37583).

[9]  William H. Press,et al.  Numerical recipes , 1990 .

[10]  Peter Knappe,et al.  Position control of a surgical robot by a navigation system , 2003, Proceedings 2003 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2003) (Cat. No.03CH37453).

[11]  Janne Heikkilä,et al.  A four-step camera calibration procedure with implicit image correction , 1997, Proceedings of IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.

[12]  Janne Heikkilä,et al.  Calibration procedure for short focal length off-the-shelf CCD cameras , 1996, Proceedings of 13th International Conference on Pattern Recognition.