Automatic detection and concealment of specular reflections for endoscopic images

Endoscopy is a minimally invasive medical diagnostic procedure, which is used for observing the surfaces of organs inside human body. The surfaces usually contain specular reflections from distributing light sources, which are visible in endoscopic images and videos. For many computer vision algorithms the highlights created by specular reflections may become significant source of error. In this paper, we propose: (a) a method for segmentation of highlights based on adoptive colour thresholding and contour analyses and (b) a powerful inpainting method, which fill the highlighted regions with information propagated from adjacent areas. The inpainting algorithm conceals the specular reflections with high accuracy and provides visually pleasurable appearance of endoscopic images and videos. The methods are compared with related approaches reported for processing of endoscopic images and the efficiency is demonstrated on large set of endoscopic images.