A Spatial Position Measurement System Using Integral Photography Based 3D Image Markers

Stereo tracking systems are used in surgical navigation to measure 3D positions of surgical instruments and patients, including invisible light based tracking systems and image based tracking systems. Optical tracking systems use reflective balls or flat chessboards as markers which can not be used in limited space. This paper introduces a new 3D spatial position measurement system using 3D image markers based on integral photography. This 3D image marker has spatial information encoded into a 2D image. Therefore, it has compact size while providing spatial position measurement. We design 3D image markers for a special probe and display them in 3D space using integral photography. Furthermore, we fulfill the stereo camera calibration, keypoints extraction and 3D position calculation. Experiments were performed to evaluate the accuracy of the system and the application is clarified to express the practicability of integral photography based 3D image markers.