A uniform, raytracing-based imaging model for rigid and fiber-optic endoscopy

Modern techniques for medical diagnosis and therapy make considerable use of endoscopes. Unfortunately, the wide-angle characteristic of endoscopes introduce severe aberrations such as chromatic aberration, geometric distortion or comb-structure to the images. The aberrations hinder or at worst prevent the application of fundamental image processing techniques for an appropriate image analysis. In this paper, we propose a uniform ray-tracing based image model for rigid as well as fiber-optic endoscopes. This model enables an objective assessment of algorithms that rely on the image formation using physically correct and thus valid ground truth data.