Projector-based augmented reality in surgery without calibration

Augmented reality (AR) is becoming an important tool in surgery to support the surgeon and improve operation quality, safety and duration. However the AR setup with head-mounted display (HMD) and other equipments is often considered cumbersome by surgeons and limits its wide use in the operating room. To reduce this burden, we introduce a new approach to display undistorted image data directly on the patient (skin, bone, surgery linen etc.) without explicit camera and projector calibration. With a single camera used to capture the surgeon's field of view, the calibration is implicitly represented as a mapping establishing the correspondence of each pixel of a camera to a pixel from a projector. After this mapping has been carried out, one can display an image corrected for the surgeon. Results are presented showing the simplicity and potential of the method for an operating room.