Optical Flow-Based Structure-from-motion for the Reconstruction of Epithelial Surfaces

•Novel optical flow-based Structure-from-Motion for scenes with few textures.•High accuracy optical flow estimation using a new illumination-invariant descriptor.•Determination of large homologous point groups using dense optical flow.•Dense 3D point cloud generation without any Multi-view Stereo step.•Robust surface reconstruction for different medical scenes and image modalities.