Structure-preserving Image Translation for Depth Estimation in Colonoscopy Video

Monocular depth estimation in colonoscopy video aims to overcome the unusual lighting properties of the colonoscopic environment. One of the major challenges in this area is the domain gap between annotated but unrealistic synthetic data and unannotated but realistic clinical data. Previous attempts to bridge this domain gap directly target the depth estimation task itself. We propose a general pipeline of structure-preserving synthetic-to-real (sim2real) image translation (producing a modified version of the input image) to retain depth geometry through the translation process. This allows us to generate large quantities of realistic-looking synthetic images for supervised depth estimation with improved generalization to the clinical domain. We also propose a dataset of hand-picked sequences from clinical colonoscopies to improve the image translation process. We demonstrate the simultaneous realism of the translated images and preservation of depth maps via the performance of downstream depth estimation on various datasets.

Leveraging Near-Field Lighting for Monocular Depth Estimation from Endoscopy Videos

Monocular depth estimation in endoscopy videos can enable assistive and robotic surgery to obtain better coverage of the organ and detection of various health issues. Despite promising progress on mainstream, natural image depth estimation, techniques perform poorly on endoscopy images due to a lack of strong geometric features and challenging illumination effects. In this paper, we utilize the photometric cues, i.e., the light emitted from an endoscope and reflected by the surface, to improve monocular depth estimation. We first create two novel loss functions with supervised and self-supervised variants that utilize a per-pixel shading representation. We then propose a novel depth refinement network (PPSNet) that leverages the same per-pixel shading representation. Finally, we introduce teacher-student transfer learning to produce better depth maps from both synthetic data with supervision and clinical data with self-supervision. We achieve state-of-the-art results on the C3VD dataset while estimating high-quality depth maps from clinical data. Our code, pre-trained models, and supplementary materials can be found on our project page: https://ppsnet.github.io/

GaNI: Global and Near Field Illumination Aware Neural Inverse Rendering

In this paper, we present GaNI, a Global and Near-field Illumination-aware neural inverse rendering technique that can reconstruct geometry, albedo, and roughness parameters from images of a scene captured with co-located light and camera. Existing inverse rendering techniques with co-located light-camera focus on single objects only, without modeling global illumination and near-field lighting more prominent in scenes with multiple objects. We introduce a system that solves this problem in two stages; we first reconstruct the geometry powered by neural volumetric rendering NeuS, followed by inverse neural radiosity that uses the previously predicted geometry to estimate albedo and roughness. However, such a naive combination fails and we propose multiple technical contributions that enable this two-stage approach. We observe that NeuS fails to handle near-field illumination and strong specular reflections from the flashlight in a scene. We propose to implicitly model the effects of near-field illumination and introduce a surface angle loss function to handle specular reflections. Similarly, we observe that invNeRad assumes constant illumination throughout the capture and cannot handle moving flashlights during capture. We propose a light position-aware radiance cache network and additional smoothness priors on roughness to reconstruct reflectance. Experimental evaluation on synthetic and real data shows that our method outperforms the existing co-located light-camera-based inverse rendering techniques. Our approach produces significantly better reflectance and slightly better geometry than capture strategies that do not require a dark room.

Personalized Video Relighting Using Casual Light Stage

In this paper, we develop a personalized video relighting algorithm that produces high-quality and temporally consistent relit video under any pose, expression, and lighting conditions in real-time. Existing relighting algorithms typically rely either on publicly available synthetic data, which yields poor relighting results, or instead on Light Stage data which is inaccessible and is not publicly available. We show that by casually capturing video of a user watching YouTube videos on a monitor we can train a personalized algorithm capable of producing high-quality relighting under any condition. Our key contribution is a novel neural relighting architecture that effectively separates the intrinsic appearance features, geometry and reflectance, from the source lighting and then combines it with the target lighting to generate a relit image. This neural architecture enables smoothing of intrinsic appearance features leading to temporally stable video relighting. Both qualitative and quantitative evaluations show that our relighting architecture improves portrait image relighting quality and temporal consistency over state-of-the-art approaches on both casually captured Light Stage at Your Desk (LSYD) data and Light Stage captured One Light At a Time (OLAT) datasets.

Joint Depth Prediction and Semantic Segmentation with Multi-View SAM

Multi-task approaches to joint depth and segmentation prediction are well-studied for monocular images. Yet, predictions from a single-view are inherently limited, while multiple views are available in many robotics applications. On the other end of the spectrum, video-based and full 3D methods require numerous frames to perform reconstruction and segmentation. With this work we propose a Multi-View Stereo (MVS) technique for depth prediction that benefits from rich semantic features of the Segment Anything Model (SAM). This enhanced depth prediction, in turn, serves as a prompt to our Transformer-based semantic segmentation decoder. We report the mutual benefit that both tasks enjoy in our quantitative and qualitative studies on the ScanNet dataset. Our approach consistently outperforms single-task MVS and segmentation models, along with multi-task monocular methods.