Latent Code Predictor for Accelerating Disparity Estimation in Stereo-Endoscopic Surface Reconstruction.

Disparity estimation from stereo-endoscopic images is critical for 3D reconstruction in minimally invasive surgery (MIS). However, surgical environments have inherent interference factors including soft tissue deformation, motion blur, and photometric inconsistency. Currently, self-supervised generative networks such as StyleGAN offer an alternative method, but their reliance on iterative latent optimization leads to high computational latency and limits practical deployment. In this work, we propose a temporal latent prediction method to accelerate this optimization process. Instead of designing a brand new generator, our framework learns to predict an optimized initial latent vector, thereby reducing the number of optimization steps and per-frame inference time. Crucially, this prediction-guided mechanism does not alter the architecture or inference logic of the generator, ensuring the fidelity of reconstruction is comparable to that of the original method. Experiments on Phantom and In vivo datasets demonstrate that our method reduces average optimization steps by 16-59% and cuts per-frame latency by about 2.3×, compared to baseline predictors and initialization strategies. Importantly, the final photometric loss remains nearly identical across all methods, confirming that acceleration does not compromise reconstruction quality. These results position our approach as a practical step toward efficient, self-supervised stereo-endoscopic reconstruction in clinical settings.