Simultaneous calibration of stereo vision and 3D optical tracker for robotic microsurgery

Visual servoing systems and 3-D optical trackers are important features in current robotic surgery research. Before performing any operation both the cameras and the tracker need to be calibrated. The procedure can be tedious and time-consuming, especially if the conditions change frequently. In this paper, a procedure is developed for the simultaneous calibration of a stereo vision system and a 3-D optical tracker. Key to the approach is joining the parameters of the two systems in a unique objective function. We show that this gives a simple method that requires less human time without increasing the calibration error significantly.