Elliptical specularity detection in endoscopy with application to normal reconstruction

To detect specularities as elliptical blobs in endoscopy. The rationale is that in the endoscopic setting, specularities are generally small and that knowing the ellipse coefficients allows one to reconstruct the surface normal. In contrast, previous works detect specular masks as free-form shapes and consider the specular pixels as nuisance.

A pipeline combining deep learning with handcrafted steps for specularity detection. This pipeline is general and accurate in the context of endoscopic applications involving multiple organs and moist tissues. A fully convolutional network produces an initial mask which specifically finds specular pixels, being mainly composed of sparsely distributed blobs. Standard ellipse fitting follows for local segmentation refinement in order to only keep the blobs fulfilling the conditions for successful normal reconstruction.

Convincing results in detection and reconstruction on synthetic and real images, showing that the elliptical shape prior improves the detection itself in both colonoscopy and kidney laparoscopy. The pipeline achieved a mean Dice of 84% and 87% respectively in test data for these two use cases, and allows one to exploit the specularities as useful information for inferring sparse surface geometry. The reconstructed normals are in good quantitative agreement with external learning-based depth reconstruction methods manifested, as shown by an average angular discrepancy of [Formula: see text] in colonoscopy.

First fully automatic method to exploit specularities in endoscopic 3D reconstruction. Because the design of current reconstruction methods can vary considerably for different applications, our elliptical specularity detection could be of potential interest in clinical practice thanks to its simplicity and generalisability. In particular, the obtained results are promising towards future integration with learning-based depth inference and SfM methods.