A deep learning approach for detecting and correcting highlights in endoscopic images

The image of an object changes dramatically depending on the lightning conditions surrounding that object. Shadows, reflections and highlights can make the object very difficult to be recognized for an automatic system. Additionally, images used in medical applications, such as endoscopic images and videos contain a large amount of such reflective components. This can pose an extra difficulty for experts to analyze such type of videos and images. It can then be useful to detect — and possibly correct — the locations where those highlights happen. In this work we designed a Convolutional Neural Network for that task. We trained such a network using a dataset that contains groundtruth highlights showing that those reflective elements can be learnt and thus located and extracted. We then used that trained network to localize and correct the highlights in endoscopic images from the El Salvador Atlas Gastrointestinal videos obtaining promising results.