TXI: Texture and Color Enhancement Imaging for Endoscopic Image Enhancement

Recognition of lesions with subtle morphological and/or color changes during white light imaging (WLI) endoscopy remains a challenge. Often the endoscopic image suffers from nonuniform illumination across the image due to curvature in the lumen and the direction of the illumination light of the endoscope. We propose an image enhancement technology to resolve the drawbacks above called texture and color enhancement imaging (TXI). TXI is designed to enhance three image factors in WLI (texture, brightness, and color) in order to clearly define subtle tissue differences. In our proposed method, retinex-based enhancement is employed in the chain of endoscopic image processing. Retinex-based enhancement is combined with color enhancement to greatly accentuate color tone differences of mucosal surfaces. We apply TXI to animal endoscopic images and evaluate the performance of TXI compared with conventional endoscopic enhancement technologies, conventionally used techniques for real-world image processing, and newly proposed techniques for surgical endoscopic image augmentation. Our experimental results show that TXI can enhance brightness selectively in dark areas of an endoscopic image and can enhance subtle tissue differences such as slight morphological or color changes while simultaneously preventing over-enhancement. These experimental results demonstrate the potential of the proposed TXI algorithm as a future clinical tool for detecting gastrointestinal lesions having difficult-to-recognize tissue differences.