Automatic tool detection from surgical imagery has a multitude of useful applications, such as real-time computer assistance for the surgeon. Using the successful residual network architecture, a system that can distinguish 21 different tools in cataract surgery videos is created. The videos are provided as part of the 2017 CATARACTS challenge and pose difficulties found in many real-world datasets, for example a strong class imbalance. The construction of the detection system is guided by a wide array of experiments that explore different design decisions.
Object detection is the problem of detecting possibly multiple objects of various classes in an image and returning their locations. This is somewhat related to the problem at hand: surgical tools must be detected in an image but the location is irrelevant. However, all state-of-the-art object detectors reviewed in @cite_19 need bounding box labels for their training, which are not available in the CATARACTS dataset. Consequently, existing object detection networks are unsuitable for this problem.
@cite_19
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We define the object detection from imagery problem as estimating a very large but extremely sparse bounding box dependent probability distribution. Subsequently we identify a sparse distribution estimation scheme, Directed Sparse Sampling, and employ it in a single end-to-end CNN based detection model. This methodology extends and formalizes previous state-of-the-art detection models with an additional emphasis on high evaluation rates and reduced manual engineering. We introduce two novelties, a corner based region-of-interest estimator and a deconvolution based CNN model. The resulting model is scene adaptive, does not require manually defined reference bounding boxes and produces highly competitive results on MSCOCO, Pascal VOC 2007 and Pascal VOC 2012 with real-time evaluation rates. Further analysis suggests our model performs particularly well when finegrained object localization is desirable. We argue that this advantage stems from the significantly larger set of available regions-of-interest relative to other methods. Source-code is available from: https: github.com lachlants denet