RECTIFICATION AND ROBUST MATCHING USING ORIENTED IMAGE TRIPLETS FOR MINIMALLY INVASIVE SURGERY

Stereo endoscopes for minimally invasive surgery have been available on the market for several years and are well established in some areas. In practice, they offer a stereoscopic view to the surgeon but are not yet intended for 3D measurements. However, using current knowledge about the camera system and the difficult conditions in object space, it is possible to reconstruct a highly accurate surface model of the current endoscopic view. In particular for medical interventions, a highly reliable point cloud and real-time computation are required. To obtain good reliability, a miniaturised trinocular camera system is introduced that reduces the amount of outliers. To reduce computation time, an approach for generation of rectified image triplets and their corresponding interior and exterior camera parameters has been developed. With these modified and parameterised images it is possible to directly process 3D measurements in object space. Accordingly, an efficient semi-global optimisation is implemented by the authors. In this paper the special camera system, the rectification approach and the applied methodology of matching in rectified image triplets are explained. Finally, first results are presented. In conclusion, the trinocular camera system provides more reliable point clouds than a binocular one, especially for areas with repetitive or poor texture. Currently, the benefit of the third camera is not as great as desired.