A Comparative Study on 3-D Stereo Reconstruction from Endoscopic Images

gianluca.uta.edu Advances in robotic surgery and the growing use of robots in minimal access surgery (MAS), has increased the need for translating computer-vision algorithms in surgical ap-plications. While methods for 3-D stereo reconstruction have been extensively investigated for man-made environ-ments, the surgical-vision lacks such studies on 3-D stereo reconstruction methods and their pros and cons on endo-scopic images. In this paper we extensively compare several dense stereo reconstruction methods on a mock-up model us-ing videos acquired from the daVinci endoscope. Also, the advantages and disadvantages of each method for different stages of the stereo-reconstruction pipeline are mentioned and supported by exhaustive experiments on endoscopic im-ages. 1