Classifying smoke in laparoscopic videos using SVM

Abstract

AbstractSmoke in laparoscopic videos usually appears due to the use of electrocautery when cutting or coagulating tissues. Therefore, detecting smoke can be used for event-based annotation in laparoscopic surgeries by retrieving the events associated with the electrocauterization. Furthermore, smoke detection can also be used for automatic smoke removal. However, detecting smoke in laparoscopic video is a challenge because of the changeability of smoke patterns, the moving camera and the different lighting conditions. In this paper, we present a video-based smoke detection algorithm to detect smoke of different densities such as fog, low and high density in laparoscopic videos. The proposed method depends on extracting various visual features from the laparoscopic images and providing them to support vector machine (SVM) classifier. Features are based on motion, colour and texture patterns of the smoke. We validated our algorithm using experimental evaluation on four laparoscopic cholecystectomy videos. These four videos were manually annotated by defining every frame as smoke or non-smoke frame. The algorithm was applied to the videos by using different feature combinations for classification. Experimental results show that the combination of all proposed features gives the best classification performance. The overall accuracy (i.e. correctly classified frames) is around 84%, with the sensitivity (i.e. correctly detected smoke frames) and the specificity (i.e. correctly detected non-smoke frames) are 89% and 80%, respectively.