| Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) says that the human meridian adjusts the running of human vital energy and blood, and connects the inner organs with the body surface and others parts of body. People’s physiology changes can be reflected by certain electrical information on the human meridian. Therefore, the purpose of medical treatments can be achieved through the acupuncture meridians and acupoints. However, doctor always determines where to do acupuncture by his subject experience, and the description of meridian acupoints in TCM teaching uses the tags on man-simulator. In a word, the TCM description of the meridian is a lack of rigorous theoretical and scientific research methods. Therefore, the pinpoint of meridian and acupoints, especially real-time display on the body surface, is important for clinical diagnosis and teaching guide.This paper introduces the idea of Computer Assisted Surgery (CAS) and the low resistance characteristics of human meridian, also presents a method to position and display meridians on human body directly. Firstly, a binocular tracking system is designed by using the stereo vision. Paste the Optical Positioning Target (OPT) on the surface of electrode plate of skin-resistance surveymeter. As long as the OPT is positioned by the tracker, the 3-Dimensional (3D) coordinates of electrode probes can be computed according to the relative geometry information between the OPT and the electrode probes. Secondly, a skin-resistance surveymeter connect to electrode plate can pick up the resistance of human skin and select the minimum impedance as the meridian point. As a result, the 3D coordinates of human meridian can be come out. Finally, the 3D coordinates of the human meridian should be merged into 2D graphics and then the meridian graphics and the images of human body captured in real-time fuse together.The key technology of binocular vision positioning system involves camera calibration, stereo matching and 3D coordinates computing. Based on the existing conditions, the paper use a method with high precision called Zhang’s flexible new camera calibration method to calibrate camera. The method is simple, flexible and fast. According to the feature of OPT, the corner on the target are extracted at the level of sub-pixel precision by the method of Harris. Then filter out the X corner based on symmetry of gray and gray-hop and match the X corners in the two images according to their characteristics. At the same time, introduce the motion estimation principle to reduce the range of corner-detection. Therefore, it can be done in real-time. At the process of 3D reconstruction, compute the information of X corners by the method called least square method based on the results of stereo matching. At the meantime, analyze the error source of the system and sum up the range of structural parameters of small errors. Then design experiment to inspect the precision of the system. After the 3D information of the X corners are obtain, the electrode probes information can be got indirectly according to the relationship between X corners and electrode probes. Therefore, introduce the skin-resistance surveymeter can select the minimum impedance and pick out the meridian point. At the process of image fusion, the method of pixel replace the original scene image and curve fitting principle are adopt to make the meridian and scene image fusion.The experiment has shown that the tracking system based on binocular stereo vision can position in a high precise level with small error under the current experiment condition. Based on the positioning system, the meridian positioning and real-time display can be realized. |
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