Several marker segmentation techniques for use with a medical AR system - A comparison

The Medarpa system is designed to support minimal invasive interventions. A semi-transparent display has been developed to provide the surgeon with information about the patient's anatomy as well as to display the instruments at their positions relative to the patient. Therefor a hybrid tracking system is used. One of the steps for setting up the system is the patient registration where externally attached markers are used, which are visible in the imaging modality used. Their segmentation is performed in a pre-processing step, and it is desireable to do this task using algorithms working (semi-)automatically. In this work three such segmentation methods are compared focusing on accuracy, speed and reliability.