Parameter-Free Matrix Decomposition for Specular Reflections Removal in Endoscopic Images

Objective: Endoscopy is a medical diagnostic procedure used to see inside the human body with the help of a camera-attached system called the endoscope. Endoscopic images and videos suffer from specular reflections (or highlight) and can have an adverse impact on the diagnostic quality of images. These scattered white regions severely affect the visual appearance of images for both endoscopists and the computer-aided diagnosis of diseases. Methods & Results: We introduce a new parameter-free matrix decomposition technique to remove the specular reflections. The proposed method decomposes the original image into a highlight-free pseudo-low-rank component and a highlight component. Along with the highlight removal, the approach also removes the boundary artifacts present around the highlight regions, unlike the previous works based on family of Robust Principal Component Analysis (RPCA). The approach is evaluated on three publicly available endoscopy datasets: Kvasir Polyp, Kvasir Normal-Pylorus and Kvasir Capsule datasets. Our evaluation is benchmarked against 4 different state-of-the-art approaches using three different well-used metrics such as Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM), Percentage of highlights remaining and Coefficient of Variation (CoV). Conclusions: The results show significant improvements over the compared methods on all three metrics. The approach is further validated for statistical significance where it emerges better than other state-of-the-art approaches.