Structure driven substitution of specular reflections for realtime heart surface tracking

Specular reflections pose a particular challenge to intensity-based tracking approaches. The proposed scheme substitutes specular areas with respect to local image structures, extracted by the structure tensor. It can be applied to images of the beating heart prior to tracking and is shown to improve the estimation of local motion by natural landmarks significantly. The runtime complexity of the substitution scheme is analysed and time measurements of the different components show that it is well suited for realtime tracking.