Practical intraoperative stereo camera calibration.

Many of the currently available stereo endoscopes employed during minimally invasive surgical procedures have shallow depths of field. Consequently, focus settings are adjusted from time to time in order to achieve the best view of the operative workspace. Invalidating any prior calibration procedure, this presents a significant problem for image guidance applications as they typically rely on the calibrated camera parameters for a variety of geometric tasks, including triangulation, registration and scene reconstruction. While recalibration can be performed intraoperatively, this invariably results in a major disruption to workflow, and can be seen to represent a genuine barrier to the widespread adoption of image guidance technologies. The novel solution described herein constructs a model of the stereo endoscope across the continuum of focus settings, thereby reducing the number of degrees of freedom to one, such that a single view of reference geometry will determine the calibration uniquely. No special hardware or access to proprietary interfaces is required, and the method is ready for evaluation during human cases. A thorough quantitative analysis indicates that the resulting intrinsic and extrinsic parameters lead to calibrations as accurate as those derived from multiple pattern views.