Domain gap in adapting self-supervised depth estimation methods for stereo-endoscopy

In endoscopy, depth estimation is a task that potentially helps in quantifying visual information for better scene understanding. A plethora of depth estimation algorithms have been proposed in the computer vision community. The endoscopic domain however, differs from the typical depth estimation sc...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Sharan Lalith, Burger Lukas, Kostiuchik Georgii, Wolf Ivo, Karck Matthias, De Simone Raffaele, Engelhardt Sandy
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: De Gruyter 2020-09-01
Series:Current Directions in Biomedical Engineering
Subjects:
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1515/cdbme-2020-0004
Description
Summary:In endoscopy, depth estimation is a task that potentially helps in quantifying visual information for better scene understanding. A plethora of depth estimation algorithms have been proposed in the computer vision community. The endoscopic domain however, differs from the typical depth estimation scenario due to differences in the setup and nature of the scene. Furthermore, it is unfeasible to obtain ground truth depth information owing to an unsuitable detection range of off-the-shelf depth sensors and difficulties in setting up a depth-sensor in a surgical environment. In this paper, an existing self-supervised approach, called Monodepth [1], from the field of autonomous driving is applied to a novel dataset of stereo-endoscopic images from reconstructive mitral valve surgery. While it is already known that endoscopic scenes are more challenging than outdoor driving scenes, the paper performs experiments to quantify the comparison, and describe the domain gap and challenges involved in the transfer of these methods.
ISSN:2364-5504