How can video analysis help laparoscopic surgeons?

Automatic analysis of minimally invasive surgical (MIS) video has the potential to drive new solutions that alleviate existing needs for safer surgeries: reproducible training programs, objective and transparent assessment systems and navigation tools to assist surgeons and improve patient safety. As an unobtrusive, always available source of information in the operating room (OR), this research proposes the use of surgical video for extracting useful information during surgical operations. Methodology proposed includes tools' tracking algorithm and 3D reconstruction of the surgical field. The motivation for these solutions is the augmentation of the laparoscopic view in order to provide orientation aids, optimal surgical path visualization, or preoperative virtual models overla

Learning to Reconstruct Texture-less Deformable Surfaces from a Single View

Recent years have seen the development of mature solutions for reconstructing deformable surfaces from a single image, provided that they are relatively well-textured. By contrast, recovering the 3D shape of texture-less surfaces remains an open problem, and essentially relates to Shape-from-Shading. In this paper, we introduce a data-driven approach to this problem. We introduce a general framework that can predict diverse 3D representations, such as meshes, normals, and depth maps. Our experiments show that meshes are ill-suited to handle texture-less 3D reconstruction in our context. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our approach generalizes well to unseen objects, and that it yields higher-quality reconstructions than a state-of-the-art SfS technique, particularly in terms of normal estimates. Our reconstructions accurately model the fine details of the surfaces, such as the creases of a T-Shirt worn by a person.Comment: Accepted to 3DV 201

Laparoscopic Video Analysis for Training and Image Guided Surgery

Automatic analysis of Minimally Invasive Surgical video has the potential to drive new solutions for alleviating needs of safe and reproducible training programs, objective and transparent evaluation systems and navigation tools to assist surgeons and improve patient safety. Surgical video is an always available source of information, which can be used without any additional intrusive hardware in the operating room. This paper is focused on surgical video analysis methods and techniques. It describes authors' contributions in two key aspects, the 3D reconstruction of the surgical field and the segmentation and tracking of tools and organs based on laparoscopic video images. Results are given to illustrate the potential of this field of research, like the calculi of the 3D position and orientation of a tool from its 2D image, or the translation of a preoperative resection plan into a hepatectomy surgical procedure using the shading information of the image. Research efforts are required to further develop these technologies in order to harness all the valuable information available in any video-based surgery

Towards Robust and Physically Plausible Shaded Stereoscopic Segmentation

International audienceWe address the multi-view shape from shading problem, that is the recovery of 3-D shape, lighting configuration and surface albedo from multiple calibrated views. Previous approaches to this problem relied on physically impossible illumination models (negative light) and only work on constant albedo and resulted in biased estimates of shape and lighting positions. Furthermore, since the solution involves infinite-dimensional optimization, existing approaches were quite slow. We develop a new model that explicitly enforces positivity in the light sources with the assumption that the object is Lambertian and its albedo is piecewise constant and show that the new model significantly improves the accuracy and robustness relative to existing approaches. Furthermore, we show that the most computationally expensive step in the optimization can actually be solved in closed form. This significantly improves speed of convergence over existing schemes. We illustrate the behavior of our algorithm directly on the same data used by previous authors, so direct comparison is possible

Learning to Reconstruct Texture-less Deformable Surfaces from a Single View

Recent years have seen the development of mature solutions for reconstructing deformable surfaces from a single image, provided that they are relatively well-textured. By contrast, recovering the 3D shape of texture-less surfaces remains an open problem, and essentially relates to Shape-from-Shading. In this paper, we introduce a data-driven approach to this problem. We introduce a general framework that can predict diverse 3D representations, such as meshes, normals, and depth maps. Our experiments show that meshes are ill-suited to handle texture-less 3D reconstruction in our context. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our approach generalizes well to unseen objects, and that it yields higher-quality reconstructions than a state-of-the-art SfS technique, particularly in terms of normal estimates. Our reconstructions accurately model the fine details of the surfaces, such as the creases of a T-Shirt worn by a person

Monocular 3D Reconstruction of Locally Textured Surfaces

Most recent approaches to monocular non-rigid 3D shape recovery rely on exploiting point correspondences and work best when the whole surface is well-textured. The alternative is to rely either on contours or shading information, which has only been demonstrated in very restrictive settings. Here, we propose a novel approach to monocular deformable shape recovery that can operate under complex lighting and handle partially textured surfaces. At the heart of our algorithm are a learned mapping from intensity patterns to the shape of local surface patches and a principled approach to piecing together the resulting local shape estimates. We validate our approach quantitatively and qualitatively using both synthetic and real data

Augmentieren von Personen in Monokularen Videodaten

When aiming at realistic video augmentation, i.e. the embedding of virtual, 3-dimensional objects into a scene's original content, a series of challenging problems has to be solved. This is especially the case when working with solely monocular input material, as important additional 3D information is missing and has to be recovered during the process, if necessary. In this work, I will present a semi-automatic strategy to tackle this task by providing solutions to individual problems in the context of virtual clothing as an example for realistic video augmentation. Starting with two different approaches for monocular pose and motion estimation, I will show how to build a 3D human body model by estimating detailed shape information as well as basic surface material properties. This information allows to further extract a dynamic illumination model from the provided input material. The illumination model is particularly important for rendering a realistic virtual object and adds a lot of realism to the final video augmentation. The animated human model is able to interact with virtual 3D objects and is used in the context of virtual clothing to animate simulated garments. To achieve the desired realism, I present an additional image-based compositing approach that realistically embeds the simulated garment into the original scene content. Combining the presented approaches provide an integrated strategy for realistic augmentation of actors in monocular video sequences.Unter der Zielsetzung einer realistischen Videoaugmentierung durch das Einbetten virtueller, dreidimensionaler Objekte in eine bestehende Videoaufnahme, gibt eine Reihe interessanter und schwieriger Problemen zu lösen. Besonders im Hinblick auf die Verarbeitung monokularer Eingabedaten fehlen wichtige räumliche Informationen, welche aus den zweidimensionalen Eingabedaten rekonstruiert werden müssen. In dieser Arbeit präsentiere ich eine halbautomatische Verfahrensweise, welche es ermöglicht, die einzelnen Teilprobleme einer umfassenden Videoaugmentierung nacheinander in einer integrierten Strategie zu lösen. Dies demonstriere ich am Beispiel von virtueller Kleidung. Beginnend mit zwei unterschiedlichen Ansätzen zur Posen- und Bewegungsrekonstruktion wird ein realistisches 3D Körpermodell eines Menschen erzeugt. Dazu wird die detaillierte Körperform durch ein geeignetes Verfahren approximiert und eine Rekonstruktion der Oberflächenmaterialen vorgenommen. Diese Informationen werden unter anderem dazu verwendet, aus dem Eingabevideo eine dynamische Szenenbeleuchtung zu rekonstruieren. Die Beleuchtungsinformationen sind besonders wichtig für eine realistische Videoaugmentierung, da gerade eine korrekte Beleuchtung den Realitätsgrad des virtuell generierten Objektes erhöht. Das rekonstruierte und animierte Körpermodell ist durch seinen Detailgrad in der Lage, mit virtuellen Objekten zu interagieren. Dies kommt besonders im Anwendungsfall von virtueller Kleidung zum tragen. Um den gewünschten Realitätsgrad zu erreichen, führe ich ein zusätzliches, bild-basiertes Korrekturverfahren ein, welches hilft, die finale Bildkomposition zu optimieren. Die Kombination aller präsentierter Teilverfahren bildet eine vollumfängliche Strategie zur Augmentierung von monokularem Videomaterial, die zur realistischen Simulation und Einbettung von virtueller Kleidung eines Schauspielers im Originalvideo verwendet werden kann