Reconstructing the normal and shape at specularities in endoscopy

Specularities are numerous in endoscopic images. They occur as many white small elliptic spots, which are generally ruled out as nuisance in image analysis and computer vision methods. Instead, we propose to use specularities as cues for 3D perception. Specifically, we propose a new method to reconstruct, at each specularity, the observed tissue's normal direction (i.e., its orientation) and shape (i.e., its curvature) from a single image. We show results on simulated and real interventional images.