Multiple Objects Positioning and Identification Method Based on Magnetic Localization System

Permanent magnet-based localization is a very promising method for the tracking of minimally invasive medical devices inside the human body, such as a wireless capsule endoscope. Current research mainly focuses on single-object tracking or multi-object tracking using the same magnets, which make it difficult to identify each target based on only the position information. In this paper, we proposed a multiple objects positioning and identification method based on the magnetic tracking system. The tracking system is built based on a magnetic sensor array. The multi-magnet tracking method has been applied to estimate the position and orientation information of each magnet by using the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm. In this method, each magnetic target has a different magnitude of the magnetic moment. During the tracking, each magnet can be identified with its magnetic moment value. The feasibility of the proposed method is verified by simulation and experimental results.