QRNet: A Quaternion-Based Retinex Framework for Enhanced Wireless Capsule Endoscopy Image Quality

Wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) offers a non-invasive diagnostic alternative for the gastrointestinal tract using a battery-powered capsule. Despite advantages, WCE encounters issues with video quality and diagnostic accuracy, often resulting in missing rates of 1–20%. These challenges stem from we...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Vladimir Frants, Sos Agaian
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2025-02-01
Series:Bioengineering
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Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2306-5354/12/3/239
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Summary:Wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) offers a non-invasive diagnostic alternative for the gastrointestinal tract using a battery-powered capsule. Despite advantages, WCE encounters issues with video quality and diagnostic accuracy, often resulting in missing rates of 1–20%. These challenges stem from weak texture characteristics due to non-Lambertian tissue reflections, uneven illumination, and the necessity of color fidelity. Traditional Retinex-based methods used for image enhancement are suboptimal for endoscopy, as they frequently compromise anatomical detail while distorting color. To address these limitations, we introduce QRNet, a novel quaternion-based Retinex framework. QRNet performs image decomposition into reflectance and illumination components within hypercomplex space, maintaining inter-channel relationships that preserve color fidelity. A quaternion wavelet attention mechanism refines essential features while suppressing noise, balancing enhancement and fidelity through an innovative loss function. Experiments on Kvasir-Capsule and Red Lesion Endoscopy datasets demonstrate notable improvements in metrics such as PSNR (+2.3 dB), SSIM (+0.089), and LPIPS (−0.126). Moreover, lesion segmentation accuracy increases by up to 5%, indicating the framework’s potential for improving early-stage lesion detection. Ablation studies highlight the quaternion representation’s pivotal role in maintaining color consistency, confirming the promise of this advanced approach for clinical settings.
ISSN:2306-5354