An application for retrieval of frames from a laparoscopic surgical video based on image of query instrument

This paper describes a practical and reliable solution/approach to achieve automated retrieval of surgical instruments used in laparoscopic surgery. The central goal is to locate particular video frames containing intended information which can be used for analysis and diagnosis. In this paper, a practical system is proposed where the users need not manually search the candidate frames in the entire video. Instead, users can give any query object (in image format) and the frames containing the object will be retrieved. Given an object image, the method extracts features like color and shape of objects in each frame of the laparoscopic video and compare with the input image feature to retrieve the frames containing the desired instrument. The system can recognize the instrument in 91% cases but does not give any false alarm. Experimental results are presented to show the feasibility of the proposed application.