title: Time-of-flight-assisted Kinect camera-based people detection for intuitive human robot cooperation in the surgical operating room.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Scene supervision is a major tool to make medical robots safer and more intuitive. The paper shows an approach to efficiently use 3D cameras within the surgical operating room to enable for safe human robot interaction and action perception. Additionally the presented approach aims to make 3D camera-based scene supervision more reliable and accurate.
  
  
  METHODS
  A camera system composed of multiple Kinect and time-of-flight cameras has been designed, implemented and calibrated. Calibration and object detection as well as people tracking methods have been designed and evaluated.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The camera system shows a good registration accuracy of 0.05 m. The tracking of humans is reliable and accurate and has been evaluated in an experimental setup using operating clothing. The robot detection shows an error of around 0.04 m.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The robustness and accuracy of the approach allow for an integration into modern operating room. The data output can be used directly for situation and workflow detection as well as collision avoidance.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Anthropomatics and Robotics (IAR), Intelligent Process Control and Robotics (IPR), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany. tim.beyl@googlemail.com.
authors.forename: Tim
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Beyl
authors.affiliation: Institute for Anthropomatics and Robotics (IAR), Intelligent Process Control and Robotics (IPR), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany.
authors.forename: Philip
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Nicolai
authors.affiliation: NeuroEngineering and Medical Robotics Laboratory, Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy.
authors.forename: Mirko D
authors.initials: MD
authors.lastname: Comparetti
authors.affiliation: Institute for Anthropomatics and Robotics (IAR), Intelligent Process Control and Robotics (IPR), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany.
authors.forename: Jörg
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Raczkowsky
authors.affiliation: NeuroEngineering and Medical Robotics Laboratory, Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy.
authors.forename: Elena
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: De Momi
authors.affiliation: Institute for Anthropomatics and Robotics (IAR), Intelligent Process Control and Robotics (IPR), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany.
authors.forename: Heinz
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Wörn
mesh_terms: D001696:Biomechanical Phenomena; D002138:Calibration; D016287:Computer Peripherals; D006801:Humans; D019545:Intuition; D009873:Operating Rooms; D065287:Robotic Surgical Procedures / Q000379:methods*; D012371:Robotics / Q000379:methods*; D014584:User-Computer Interface
keywords: 3D vision; Digital operating room; Environment supervision; RGB-D cameras; Surgical robotics; ToF cameras