Depth-Aware Endoscopic Video Inpainting

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel depth-aware endoscopic video inpainting framework that effectively preserves 3D spatial details by integrating depth estimation, fusion, and fidelity assessment, outperforming existing methods.

Contribution

The proposed DAEVI framework combines direct depth estimation, advanced fusion, and a depth fidelity discriminator to improve endoscopic video inpainting quality.

Findings

Achieves 2% higher PSNR than state-of-the-art methods

Reduces MSE by 6% compared to existing approaches

Enhances inpainting of fine details in endoscopic videos

Abstract

Video inpainting fills in corrupted video content with plausible replacements. While recent advances in endoscopic video inpainting have shown potential for enhancing the quality of endoscopic videos, they mainly repair 2D visual information without effectively preserving crucial 3D spatial details for clinical reference. Depth-aware inpainting methods attempt to preserve these details by incorporating depth information. Still, in endoscopic contexts, they face challenges including reliance on pre-acquired depth maps, less effective fusion designs, and ignorance of the fidelity of 3D spatial details. To address them, we introduce a novel Depth-aware Endoscopic Video Inpainting (DAEVI) framework. It features a Spatial-Temporal Guided Depth Estimation module for direct depth estimation from visual features, a Bi-Modal Paired Channel Fusion module for effective channel-by-channel fusion of visual and depth information, and a Depth Enhanced Discriminator to assess the fidelity of the RGB-D sequence comprised of the inpainted frames and estimated depth images. Experimental evaluations on established benchmarks demonstrate our framework's superiority, achieving a 2% improvement in PSNR and a 6% reduction in MSE compared to state-of-the-art methods. Qualitative analyses further validate its enhanced ability to inpaint fine details, highlighting the benefits of integrating depth information into endoscopic inpainting.