Benchmarking Laparoscopic Surgical Image Restoration and Beyond

In laparoscopic surgery, a clear and high-quality visual field is critical for surgeons to make accurate intraoperative decisions. However, persistent visual degradation, including smoke generated by energy devices, lens fogging from thermal gradients, and lens contamination due to blood or tissue fluid splashes during surgical procedures, severely impair visual clarity. These degenerations can seriously hinder surgical workflow and pose risks to patient safety. To systematically investigate and address various forms of surgical scene degradation, we introduce a real-world open-source surgical image restoration dataset covering laparoscopic environments, called SurgClean, which involves multi-type image restoration tasks, e.g., desmoking, defogging, and desplashing. SurgClean comprises 1,020 images with diverse degradation types and corresponding paired reference labels. Based on SurgClean, we establish a standardized evaluation benchmark and provide performance for 22 representative generic task-specific image restoration approaches, including 12 generic and 10 task-specific image restoration approaches. Experimental results reveal substantial performance gaps relative to clinical requirements, highlighting a critical opportunity for algorithm advancements in intelligent surgical restoration. Furthermore, we explore the degradation discrepancies between surgical and natural scenes from structural perception and semantic understanding perspectives, providing fundamental insights for domain-specific image restoration research. Our work aims to empower the capabilities of restoration algorithms to increase surgical environments and improve the efficiency of clinical procedures.

CoA: Towards Real Image Dehazing via Compression-and-Adaptation

Learning-based image dehazing algorithms have shown remarkable success in synthetic domains. However, real image dehazing is still in suspense due to computational resource constraints and the diversity of real-world scenes. Therefore, there is an urgent need for an algorithm that excels in both efficiency and adaptability to address real image dehazing effectively. This work proposes a Compression-and-Adaptation (CoA) computational flow to tackle these challenges from a divide-and-conquer perspective. First, model compression is performed in the synthetic domain to develop a compact dehazing parameter space, satisfying efficiency demands. Then, a bilevel adaptation in the real domain is introduced to be fearless in unknown real environments by aggregating the synthetic dehazing capabilities during the learning process. Leveraging a succinct design free from additional constraints, our CoA exhibits domain-irrelevant stability and model-agnostic flexibility, effectively bridging the model chasm between synthetic and real domains to further improve its practical utility. Extensive evaluations and analyses underscore the approach's superiority and effectiveness. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/fyxnl/COA.

FrustumFusionNets: A Three-Dimensional Object Detection Network Based on Tractor Road Scene

To address the issues of the existing frustum-based methods' underutilization of image information in road three-dimensional object detection as well as the lack of research on agricultural scenes, we constructed an object detection dataset using an 80-line Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) and a camera in a complex tractor road scene and proposed a new network called FrustumFusionNets (FFNets). Initially, we utilize the results of image-based two-dimensional object detection to narrow down the search region in the three-dimensional space of the point cloud. Next, we introduce a Gaussian mask to enhance the point cloud information. Then, we extract the features from the frustum point cloud and the crop image using the point cloud feature extraction pipeline and the image feature extraction pipeline, respectively. Finally, we concatenate and fuse the data features from both modalities to achieve three-dimensional object detection. Experiments demonstrate that on the constructed test set of tractor road data, the FrustumFusionNetv2 achieves 82.28% and 95.68% accuracy in the three-dimensional object detection of the two main road objects, cars and people, respectively. This performance is 1.83% and 2.33% better than the original model. It offers a hybrid fusion-based multi-object, high-precision, real-time three-dimensional object detection technique for unmanned agricultural machines in tractor road scenarios. On the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and Toyota Technological Institute (KITTI) Benchmark Suite validation set, the FrustumFusionNetv2 also demonstrates significant superiority in detecting road pedestrian objects compared with other frustum-based three-dimensional object detection methods.