Image-based camera motion estimation using prior probabilities

Abstract

Image-based camera motion estimation from video or still images is a difficult problem in the field of computer vision. Many algorithms have been proposed for estimating intrinsic camera parameters, detecting and matching features between images, calculating extrinsic camera parameters based on those features, and optimizing the recovered parameters with nonlinear methods. These steps in the camera motion inference process all face challenges in practical applications: locating distinctive features can be difficult in many types of scenes given the limited capabilities of current feature detectors, camera motion inference can easily fail in the presence of noise and outliers in the matched features, and the error surfaces in optimization typically contain many suboptimal local minima. The problems faced by these techniques are compounded when they are applied to medical video captured by an endoscope, which presents further challenges such as non-rigid scenery and severe barrel distortion of the images. In this paper, we study these problems and propose the use of prior probabilities to stabilize camera motion estimation for the application of computing endoscope motion sequences in colonoscopy. Colonoscopy presents a special case for camera motion estimation in which it is possible to characterize typical motion sequences of the endoscope. As the endoscope is restricted to move within a roughly tube-shaped structure, forward/backward motion is expected, with only small amounts of rotation and horizontal movement. We formulate a probabilistic model of endoscope motion by maneuvering an endoscope and attached magnetic tracker through a synthetic colon model and fitting a distribution to the observed motion of the magnetic tracker. This model enables us to estimate the probability of the current endoscope motion given previously observed motion in the sequence. We add these prior probabilities into the camera motion calculation as an additional penalty term in RANSAC to help reject improbable motion parameters caused by outliers and other problems with medical data. This paper presents the theoretical basis of our method along with preliminary results on indoor scenes and synthetic colon images.