Tracking-by-Registration: A Robust Approach for Optical Tracking System in Surgical Navigation

Optical tracking system (OTS) is an important part of surgical navigation and has been widely employed in clinical practice due to high accuracy and reliability. However, current OTS has a common occlusion of line-of-sight (LoS) problem. To address the partial occlusion problem of target, we propose a tracking-by-registration (TbR) method based on a novel grid-based target (GT) and a corresponding target generation algorithm (TGA). Based on the word probability and target distance metric, TGA generates a set of GTs to minimize ambiguity. Utilizing the prior information of model sets, the identification of different targets is realized during tracking. An infrared (IR) marker’s performance is theoretically evaluated and the maximum angles within the feasible range are validated. Both simulations and experiments have been carried out to validate the feasibility and performance of the proposed approach. The results indicate that the proposed approach has satisfactory performance to track the occluded target and provide a new option for optical tracking technologies.