Real-time segmentation of surgical instruments inside the abdominal cavity using a joint hue saturation color feature

In this paper, the real-time segmentation of surgical instruments with color images used in minimally invasive surgery is addressed. This work has been developed in the scope of the robotized laparoscopic surgery, specifically for the detection and tracking of gray regions and accounting for images of metallic instruments inside the abdominal cavity. With this environment, the moving background due to the breathing motion, the non-uniform and time-varying lighting conditions and the presence of specularities are the main difficulties to overcome. Then, to achieve an automatic color segmentation suitable for robot control, we developed a technique based on a discriminant color feature with robustness capabilities with respect to intensity variations and specularities. We also designed an adaptive region growing with automatic region seed detection and a model-based region classification, both dedicated to laparoscopy. The foreseen application is a good training ground to evaluate the proposed technique and the effectiveness of this work has been demonstrated through experimental results with endoscopic image sequences to efficiently locate boundaries of a landmark-free needle-holder at half the video-rate.