This paper proposes a novel method for acquiring an intestinal direction vector (IDV) based on a single static wireless endoscopic image. The IDV can be used for navigation of wireless capsule endoscopy, and for multicamera microball system, this information can help to select cameras to capture images of the region of interest. Our proposal is based on lumen detection, which involves Bayer-format downsample, adaptive threshold segmentation, and radial texture detection. Then, an IDV calculation method with only one single static image by modeling the small intestine and image capture process is put forward. The performance of the proposed method is verified with experiments based on real digestive tract images and the microball demo system. The lumen detection method achieves 95.5% precision and 98.1% sensitivity. The experimental results in pig intestine show that the error of IDV is limited by a sphere with center (-0.00629, 0.00097, 0.00061) and radius 0.085.