Intrinsic feature pose measurement for awake animal SPECT imaging

New developments have been made in optical motion tracking for awake animal imaging that measures 3D position and orientation (pose) for a single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) imaging system. Ongoing SPECT imaging research has been directed towards head motion measurement for brain studies in awake, unrestrained mice. In contrast to previous results using external markers, this work extracts and tracks intrinsic features from multiple camera images and computes relative pose from the tracked features over time. Motion tracking thus far has been limited to measuring extrinsic features such as retro-reflective markers applied to the mouse´s head. While this approach has been proven to be accurate, the additional animal handling required to attach the markers is undesirable. A significant improvement in the procedure is achieved by measuring the pose of the head without extrinsic markers using only the external surface appearance. This approach is currently being developed with initial results presented here. The intrinsic features measurement extracts discrete, sparse natural features from 2D images such as eyes, nose, mouth and other visible structures. Stereo correspondence between features for a camera pair is determined for calculation of 3D positions. These features are also tracked over time to provide continuity for surface model fitting. Experimental results from live images are presented.