Efficient Enhancement of Stereo Endoscopic Images Based on Joint Wavelet Decomposition and Binocular Combination

Bilel Sdiri, Mounir Kaaniche, Faouzi Alaya Cheikh, Azeddine Beghdadi, Ole Jakob Elle

Abstract:

The success of minimally invasive interventions and
the remarkable technological and medical progress have made
endoscopic image enhancement a very active research field. Due
to the intrinsic endoscopic domain characteristics and the surgical
exercise, stereo endoscopic images may suffer from different
degradations which affect its quality. Therefore, in order to
provide the surgeons with a better visual feedback and improve
the outcomes of possible subsequent processing steps, namely a
3D organ reconstruction/registration, it would be interesting to
improve the stereo endoscopic image quality. To this end, we
propose in this paper two joint enhancement methods which
operate in the wavelet transform domain. More precisely, by
resorting to a joint wavelet decomposition, the wavelet subbands
of the right and left views are simultaneously processed to exploit
the binocular vision properties. While the first proposed tech-
nique combines only the approximation subbands of both views,
the second method combines all the wavelet subbands yielding
an inter-view processing fully adapted to the local features of
the stereo endoscopic images. Experimental results, carried out
on various stereo endoscopic datasets, have demonstrated the
efficiency of the proposed enhancement methods in terms of
perceived visual image quality.