Real-time Augmented Reality With IGSTK

The IGSTK (Image-Guided Surgery Toolkit) library is a free and open toolkit for the development of prototype surgical navigation applications. IGSTK contains all necessary modules required for surgical 2D and 3D visualization, DICOM data import, various 3D-tracking systems and handling of live-video input directly or over a network. IGSTK was added a new component for real-time, interactive augmented reality visualization, IGSTK-AR, that can handle conventional and wide-angle cameras, provides for camera calibration, camera-to-tracker registration, lowlatency processing of input video streams, and GPU based low-latency overlay visualization. The implementation was tested with a 4 mm endoscope and an ordinary camcorder (Canon MV 20) and had a system latency that is useful for surgical application, 272.8 ± 25.6 ms (min: 240 ms, max: 320 ms). The system was run with a non-optimized code. IGTK-AR seamlessly integrates to the current IGSTK View architecture and yields a fully object-oriented IGSTK system architecture.