Stabilising visualisation by reducing camera movements in virtual colonoscopy methods

In virtual colonoscopy (VC) approaches, cameras are moved along the centerline of a colon to visualise its inner surface. The orientation of each camera depends on its position and the optical axis (look-at) and view up vectors control the camera direction. However, the look-at and view-up vectors are changing at each position along the centerline due to bending and torsion in the colon surface. Therefore, this rough camera movement generates an unsmooth image sequence (i.e., large differences between consecutive frames), which is not comfortable to the observer’s eyes. To solve this problem, we propose a transformation method that embeds the 3D colon centerline into a 2D plane or a 1D line. We can use this transformation to stabilise the camera movement in different VC visualisation methods. We use the visualisation loss to quantify the feasibility of the proposed method by comparing the visualisation quality before and after applying the proposed transformation.