The purpose of this project is to measure the position and orientation of a needle tip being inserted through a transparent block of gelatin. Video from extrinsically-calibrated stereo cameras is used. The needle tip coordinate is found in each camera feed separately using Farneback dense optical flow and some simple filtering. Each pair of coordinates is used to find a 3D position through stereo triangulation.
The motivation behind all this is to provide a way to test image-guided needle insertion technology without requiring MRI equipment. This is a part of my Master's thesis work at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) Automation and Interventional Medicine (AIM) Lab.