Improving the Accuracy of Feature Extraction for Flexible Endoscope Calibration by Spatial Super Resolution

Many applications in the domain of medical as well as industrial image processing make considerable use of flexible endoscopes - so called fiberscopes - to gain visual access to holes, hollows, antrums and cavities that are difficult to enter and examine. For a complete exploration and understanding of an antrum, 3d depth information might be desirable or yet necessary. This often requires the mapping of 3d world coordinates to 2d image coordinates which is estimated by camera calibration. In order to retrieve useful results, the precise extraction of the imaged calibration pattern´s markers plays a decisive role in the camera calibration process. Unfortunately, when utilizing fiberscopes, the image conductor introduces a disturbing comb structure to the images that anticipates a (precise) marker extraction. Since the calibration quality crucially depends on subpixel-precise calibration marker positions, we apply static comb structure removal algorithms along with a dynamic spatial resolution enhancement method in order to improve the feature extraction accuracy. In our experiments, we demonstrate that our approach results in a more accurate calibration of flexible endoscopes and thus allows for a more precise reconstruction of 3d information from fiberoptic images.