A comparative study on 3-D stereo reconstruction from endoscopic images

Advances in robotic surgery and growing use of robots in minimal access surgery (MAS), has increased the need of adapting computer-vision algorithms for surgical-vision applications. While methods for 3-D reconstruction are extensively investigated on man-made environments, the surgical-vision lacks such studies on 3-D reconstruction methods and their pros and cons on endoscopic images. In this paper we extensively compared several dense stereo reconstruction methods on a mock-up model using videos acquired from the daVinci endoscope. Also, the advantages and disadvantages of each method for different stages of stereo reconstruction are mentioned and supported by exhaustive experiments on endoscopic images.