Scale‐preserving shape reconstruction from monocular endoscope image sequences by supervised depth learning

Abstract Reconstructing 3D shapes from images are becoming popular, but such methods usually estimate relative depth maps with ambiguous scales. A method for reconstructing a scale‐preserving 3D shape from monocular endoscope image sequences through training an absolute depth prediction network is proposed. First, a dataset of synchronized sequences of RGB images and depth maps is created using an endoscope simulator. Then, a supervised depth prediction network is trained that estimates a depth map from a RGB image minimizing the loss compared to the ground‐truth depth map. The predicted depth map sequence is aligned to reconstruct a 3D shape. Finally, the proposed method is applied to a real endoscope image sequence.