EndoOmni: Zero-Shot Cross-Dataset Depth Estimation in Endoscopy by Robust Self-Learning from Noisy Labels
This addresses the challenge of limited real-world applicability in surgical endoscopy tasks like localization and reconstruction, though it appears incremental as it builds on self-learning paradigms with robustness enhancements.
The paper tackles the problem of single-image depth estimation in endoscopy, where existing methods struggle with cross-dataset generalization due to scarce and noisy medical data labels, and presents EndoOmni, a foundation model that achieves 33-34% improvement over state-of-the-art methods in zero-shot relative depth estimation on specific datasets.
Single-image depth estimation is essential for endoscopy tasks such as localization, reconstruction, and augmented reality. Most existing methods in surgical scenes focus on in-domain depth estimation, limiting their real-world applicability. This constraint stems from the scarcity and inferior labeling quality of medical data for training. In this work, we present EndoOmni, the first foundation model for zero-shot cross-domain depth estimation for endoscopy. To harness the potential of diverse training data, we refine the advanced self-learning paradigm that employs a teacher model to generate pseudo-labels, guiding a student model trained on large-scale labeled and unlabeled data. To address training disturbance caused by inherent noise in depth labels, we propose a robust training framework that leverages both depth labels and estimated confidence from the teacher model to jointly guide the student model training. Moreover, we propose a weighted scale-and-shift invariant loss to adaptively adjust learning weights based on label confidence, thus imposing learning bias towards cleaner label pixels while reducing the influence of highly noisy pixels. Experiments on zero-shot relative depth estimation show that our EndoOmni improves state-of-the-art methods in medical imaging for 33\% and existing foundation models for 34\% in terms of absolute relative error on specific datasets. Furthermore, our model provides strong initialization for fine-tuning metric depth estimation, maintaining superior performance in both in-domain and out-of-domain scenarios. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/TianCuteQY/EndoOmni.