Projective 3D-reconstruction of Uncalibrated Endoscopic Images

Abstract

The most common medical diagnostic method for urinary bladder cancer is cystoscopy. This inspection of the bladder is performed by a rigid endoscope, which is usually guided close to the bladder wall. This causes a very limited field of view; difficulty of navigation is aggravated by the usage of angled endoscopes. These factors cause difficulties in orientation and visual control. To overcome this problem, the paper presents a method for extracting 3D information from uncalibrated endoscopic image sequences and for reconstructing the scene content. The method uses the SURF-algorithm to extract features from the images and relates the images by advanced matching. To stabilize the matching, the epipolar geometry is extracted for each image pair using a modified RANSAC-algorithm. Afterwards these matched point pairs are used to generate point triplets over three images and to describe the trifocal geometry. The 3D scene points are determined by applying triangulation to the matched image points. Thus, these points are used to generate a projective 3D reconstruction of the scene, and provide the first step for further metric reconstructions.