Chenkang Du

Liangjing Shao, Linxin Bai, Chenkang Du et al.

Monocular depth estimation and ego-motion estimation are significant tasks for scene perception and navigation in stable, accurate and efficient robot-assisted endoscopy. To tackle lighting variations and sparse textures in endoscopic scenes, multiple techniques including optical flow, appearance flow and intrinsic image decomposition have been introduced into the existing methods. However, the effective training strategy for multiple modules are still critical to deal with both illumination issues and information interference for self-supervised depth estimation in endoscopy. Therefore, a novel framework with multistep efficient finetuning is proposed in this work. In each epoch of end-to-end training, the process is divided into three steps, including optical flow registration, multiscale image decomposition and multiple transformation alignments. At each step, only the related networks are trained without interference of irrelevant information. Based on parameter-efficient finetuning on the foundation model, the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on self-supervised depth estimation on SCARED dataset and zero-shot depth estimation on Hamlyn dataset, with 4\%$\sim$10\% lower error. The evaluation code of this work has been published on https://github.com/BaymaxShao/EndoMUST.

Liangjing Shao, Chenkang Du, Benshuang Chen et al.

Self-supervised monocular depth estimation is a significant task for low-cost and efficient 3D scene perception and measurement in endoscopy. However, the variety of illumination conditions and scene features is still the primary challenges for depth estimation in endoscopic scenes. In this work, a novel self-supervised framework is proposed for monocular depth estimation in diverse endoscopy. Firstly, considering the diverse features in endoscopic scenes with different tissues, a novel block-wise mixture of dynamic low-rank experts is proposed to efficiently finetune the foundation model for endoscopic depth estimation. In the proposed module, based on the input feature, different experts with a small amount of trainable parameters are adaptively selected for weighted inference, from low-rank experts which are allocated based on the generalization of each block. Moreover, a novel self-supervised training framework is proposed to jointly cope with brightness inconsistency and reflectance interference. The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art works on SCARED dataset and SimCol dataset. Furthermore, the proposed network also achieves the best generalization based on zero-shot depth estimation on C3VD, Hamlyn and SERV-CT dataset. The outstanding performance of our model is further demonstrated with 3D reconstruction and ego-motion estimation. The proposed method could contribute to accurate endoscopy for minimally invasive measurement and surgery. The evaluation codes will be released upon acceptance, while the demo videos can be found on: https://endo-gmde.netlify.app/.