Abstract:

Surgical microscopes are important instruments in medicine. Their function is the upscaling of images in aid of surgeries. The employment of more than one camera allows for 3D reconstruction of the operation site. A prerequisite, however, is the synchronization of said cameras. Furthermore, the pictures taken must be of equal quality, i.e. cameras of the same type must be used. Also, their colour spaces should be equally calibrated due to differences in production and colour temperature. For this, an understanding of the manner in which the human eye works is needed, as the cameras work in a similar way. Furthermore, the reader is introduced to the technical fundamentals of camera function, e.g. Bayer filters and automatic white balance and made familiar with the basics of software design and user interface creation with C# and Windows Forms in Visual Studio. In addition, the tools used in this work and the custom user interfaces which were created are presented. In addition to the fundamental technical background, the different factors that influence the cameras colour accuracy are discussed and ways to synchronize the cameras by using timestamps and a metronome are presented. Finally, the reasons which caused this approach to not work as expected in this case are presented and possible causes for the issues with colour accuracy and synchronization are evaluated.