First Deployment of Diminished Reality for Anatomy Education

Understanding the anatomy of the human body is vital for everyone working in the medical domain. Augmented reality (AR) systems for anatomy teaching, which display virtual information directly on top of a users' body, have proven to facilitate mental mapping compared to traditional teaching paradigms. In this paper, we explore the potential of diminished reality (DR) in the context of anatomy education. As a first necessary step to achieving a DR anatomy education system, parts of the human body have to be extracted and diminished from the video stream. Our system diminishes either the arm or head of the user by projecting a background image recovered using RGB-D cameras. Such a system, if combined with an accurate overlay of virtual counterparts, could potentially improve the learning effect by attracting the users' attention to the virtual information and improve visual perception by avoiding the well-known floating effect of AR.