A new real-time method for distortion correction in surgical robot positioning systems

A surgical robot usually utilizes a small marker ball to implement positioning task. However, a tough problem of this system is that images gathered in this system are always distorted, which reduces the accuracy of our positioning. Conventional distortion correction methods have to compute the whole image before determine a certain point's ideal position, which is time consuming and cannot meet the system's real-time requirement. So in this paper, a novel correction method is proposed. It is distinguished from the conventional methods in its real-time property. This novel method analyzes the distortion model, to establish an equation between the distorted points and the distortion-free points. Then an algorithm based on fixed point theorem is applied to solve this high order equation. Experiments with explicit data show that this novel method has about the same correction accuracy as the conventional methods but with much less time, totally meet the real-time requirement.