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.