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In order to reduce the miss rate of the wireless capsule endoscopy and help physicians to read endoscopic images in an easier manner, this paper proposes a Micro-Ball endoscopy system which is equipped with six cameras. This work develops key techniques to miniaturize the size and lower the power consumption of the Micro-Ball. The Micro-Ball is activated by a wireless power supply unit with a rectifying efficiency of 93.6%. An effective image post-processing method for deriving 2D representation of the digestive tract wall is also presented. The Micro-Ball integrates a low-power attitude sensing unit to provide information for image registration and Micro-Ball control. These designs assure that the Micro-Ball has small size (diameter less than 15mm), can work for more than 15 hours, at an image resolution of 480×480 and an image frame rate of 2fps, when powered by 1.55V@60mAh battery. The effectiveness of the Micro-Ball system has been verified by an FPGA demonstration system.

Wireless endoscopic Micro-Ball system makes it possible to generate the map of gastrointestinal (GI) tract wall. This paper proposes a new method for the generation of small intestine map based on the attitude sensing system embedded in the endoscopic Micro-Ball. In this method, the captured images can be inversely projected on the interior wall of small intestine and then 2D representation of the inversely projected images can be created. The method reduces the complexity of 2D representation of small intestine map, because it removes the perspective distortion of the captured images. Moreover, the attitude information related to the images determines the location of the generated images in the small intestine map. The location information can reduce the amount of calculation when used in image registration of the endoscopic Micro-Ball images. Experimental results show the method is feasible and high efficient.