Surface reconstruction from endoscopic image sequence

The current study describes a technique for reconstructing a three dimensional surface from multiple images of the (single camera) endoscopic video. A 3D shape of the scene in each image frame of the endoscopic video was reconstructed using shape from shading technique. The characteristic feature points on the 2D images were detected using SURF algorithm and the features were matched using BRIEF and Hamming distance criteria. The matched feature points between the consecutive frames were used to find the transformation matrix to align the 3D surfaces of the consecutive video frames. Using the transformation matrix, the 3D surfaces were stitched (registered) together. The method was applied on a recorded video of the laparoscopic surgery. The reconstructed surface provides a wider view and depth information to the viewers.