Efficient tracking of the heart using texture.

Performing motion tracking in real-time is an old and recurrent problem in Computer Vision. It has been addressed through a large set of approaches [17], [9], [1], but achieving a high level of robustness is still a challenge, especially with low definition input. In the considered application, tracking the heart motion in endoscopic beating heart sequences, the sensitivity of existing algorithms to visual artifacts and variations in illumination is an issue that calls for improvements. In the prospect of developing a motion compensation architecture for robotically assisted beating heart surgery, we address the problem of visual information retrieval by proposing a new Composite Tracking Algorithm using both template matching and texture analysis. As we will show in this paper, the use of texture characterization of the heart surface improves the overall precision and robustness, in comparison with other prior approaches.