Real-Time Image Mosaic for Endoscopic Video Sequences

We present an algorithm capable of making in real time image mosaics with enlarged field-of-view from the endoscopic video data stream. The algorithm is based on the method of Kourogi et al. (1999) which we extend to the case of endoscopic masks. The algorithm automatically finds the optimal affine transform between video frames and builds the enlarged field-of-view as an intervention-free side task. We apply our algorithm to endoscopic video sequences and compare it to the well-known image-mosaicing algorithm of Szeliski (1994). Our method turns out to be more robust, more than 3 times faster, having at the same time a 4 times smaller average motion estimation error: 0.19 pixel instead of 0.72 pixel between successive frames.