Endoscopic stereo reconstruction: a comparative study

Advances in robotic surgery especially in minimally-invasive surgery (MIS) has increased the need for translating computer-vision algorithms in endoscopic imagery to support surgical decisions. While methods for stereo reconstruction have been extensively investigated for man-made environments, such an extensive and detailed study on the pros and cons of stereo reconstruction for endoscopic images. In this paper, we extensively compare several state-of-the-art methods on both simulated as well as real endoscopic images over controlled in-lab and phantom models observed by a daVinci stereo endoscope. The advantages and disadvantages of each compared method over the major steps of a stereo-reconstruction pipeline are discussed and supported by exhaustive experiments and discussions.