on a mapper frame next to the patient (Fig. 1). While
the patient may unwillingly conduct small motions
w.r.t. the marker ensemble, the required high preci-
sion of patient co-registration prohibits such motion.
Motion is, therefore, compensated for by measuring
patient’s movement electromagnetically and calculat-
ing its influence on stereoscopic matching.
In order to allow navigated surgery, the surgical
navigation system needs to co-register the patient’s
facial surface at the time of the operation with pre-
surgically acquired data. The patient’s facial surface
is acquired by stereo photogrammetry in co-ordinates
of the mapper frame (shown in Fig. 1, bearing the
reference markers). The facial surface is also con-
tained in the 3D pre-surgical data. It is matched with
the photogrammetric facial surface. The matching of
the two surfaces is the measurement providing the re-
quired co-registration information.
In an online data acquisition the quality of co-
registration can be tested using an electromagnetic
touch-based pointer device on the patient’s facial sur-
face as long as he/she remains in the operational set-
ting with the electromagnetic forehead patient local-
izer unchanged (Fig. 1). During a check the local-
izer’s position is superimposed to the pre-surgical
face surface on the display. In other words, the
touch-pointer device coordinates are transformed to
the pre-surgical surface from electromagnetic touch-
pointer localizer co-ordinate system via electromag-
netic field emitter, electromagnetic mapper-frame lo-
calizer, marker-based optical mapper frame defini-
tion, photogrammetric facial surface reconstruction,
and facial surface matching solution towards the co-
ordinate system of the pre-surgical data. So a concate-
nated transformation involving six coordinate systems
is conducted. The procedure includes calibration data
of different devices, e.g. calibration data of the touch-
pointer device, or of the mapper frame.
After photogrammetric co-registration with the
pre-surgical data has been conducted, the continued
online measurements of the patient localizer allow
movements of the patient during the operation with-
out loosing reference between pre-surgical and actual
facial surface. The difference between patient local-
izer during photogrammetric acquisition and patient
localizer at any other time (e.g. at time of check with
the electromagnetic touch-based pointer) is taken into
account by the transformation difference between cur-
rent patient localizer coordinate system and patient
localizer coordinate system at the time of photogram-
metric image acquisition.
We focus on the elimination of patient motion ef-
fects that occur in-between the acquisitions of the
first and the subsequent monocular images used for
photogrammetric surface reconstruction. Compensa-
tion of these motions is both essential for geometri-
cally accurate “visual structure from motion” recon-
struction as well as uncommon in standard processing
chains, which is why it is subject of this paper.
The rest of the paper in organised as follows: In
the next section, some of the related previous works
are discussed along with an outline of how our ap-
proach is different to them. In Section 3, the two ap-
proaches to motion compensation, and the impact of
no compensation are discussed. Experimental find-
ings on phantom and real patient are presented in Sec-
tion 4. Finally, in Section 5 the paper is concluded.
2 RELATED WORK
The inverse problem of 3D surface reconstruction
from multiple images is fundamental in computer vi-
sion. Solutions to this VSfM task can be found in
literature as early as in the 1980’s (Ullman, 1979;
Grimson, 1981). Initially, the field was dominated by
sparse feature-based reconstruction (Hartley and Zis-
serman, 2003). Over the years, with the surge in com-
putational resources, dense 3D reconstruction was in-
troduced (Furukawa and Ponce, 2009), and demon-
strated (Newcombe et al., 2015). Dense surface re-
construction from multiple images forms the back-
bone for various modern computer vision applica-
tions.
The improvements in the solution of the inverse
3D problem also led to its application in medical do-
main. In medicine, it is widely used as low-cost non-
invasive alternative for accurate and external mea-
surements. Recently, to investigate cranial deforma-
tion in infants, Barbero-Garc
´
ıa et al. (2019) proposed
use of smartphone-based photogrammetric 3D head
modelling. A video stream was recorded so as to ob-
tain 200-300 images, which were then used to create
a 3D head model. The accuracy of the photogram-
metric model was comparable to a radiological cra-
nial 3D model. A survey by Ey-Chmielewska et al.
(2015) highlights the application of photogrammetry
in screening tests of spinal curvature, ophthalmology,
dermatology, dentistry and orthodontics.
In the medical field, application of photogramme-
try is not restricted to external measurements and is
often used in planning and monitoring of surgeries.
This involves registration of available pre-surgical 3D
data with online-acquired data. Co-registration before
and during treatment is generally achieved by image-
based techniques. Registration of patient’s face sur-
face with pre-surgical data was utilized in navigated
surgery (Hellwich et al., 2016). For accurate localiza-