Methods of detecting endoscope insertion direction

摘要

The method of detecting the direction of insertion of an endoscope includes the steps of a) forming a system of images made of a plurality of picture images which have a different number of pixels from the same endoscope image, and b) extracting a spatially largest region including an average gray level and variance of gray level within predetermined ranges by examining the average gray level and variance of the gray level of respective pixels in a plurality of picture images formed by the forming step. The region extracted by the extracting step is considered to be an endoscope insertion direction.