Moments Based Ultrasound Visual Servoing: From a Mono to Multiplane Approach
This paper presents a new image based visual servoing approach to control a robotic system equipped with an ultrasound (US) imaging device. The presented method allows an automatic positioning of the probe with respect to an object of interest. Moments based image features are computed from three orthogonal US images to servo in plane and out of plane motions of the system. An efficient segmentation method, based on graph cut strategy, is proposed to extract the object contour in each image plane. Simulation results demonstrate that this approach improves upon techniques based on a single 2 D US image in terms of probe positioning. Our method was also validated from robotic experiments performed on a US phantom with the use of a motorized 3 D probe that provides the three US images.
IEEE Transactions on Robotics