Video-based surgical instrument segmentation plays an important role in robot-assisted surgeries. Unlike supervised settings, unsupervised segmentation relies heavily on motion cues, which are challenging to discern due to the typically lower quality of optical flow in surgical footage compared to natural scenes. This presents a considerable burden for the advancement of unsupervised segmentation techniques. In our work, we address the challenge of enhancing model performance despite the inherent limitations of low-quality optical flow. Our methodology employs a three-pronged approach: extracting boundaries directly from the optical flow, selectively discarding frames with inferior flow quality, and employing a fine-tuning process with variable frame rates. We thoroughly evaluate our strategy on the EndoVis2017 VOS dataset and Endovis2017 Challenge dataset, where our model demonstrates promising results, achieving a mean Intersection-over-Union (mIoU) of 0.75 and 0.72, respectively. Our findings suggest that our approach can greatly decrease the need for manual annotations in clinical environments and may facilitate the annotation process for new datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/wpr1018001/Rethinking-Low-quality-Optical-Flow.git

通过我们的方法，在低质量光流的困境下，从光流直接提取边界、选择性地丢弃质量较差的帧，并使用可变帧率的微调过程，我们在EndoVis2017 VOS数据集和Endovis2017 Challenge数据集上展现了有希望的结果，分别达到了0.75和0.72的平均交并比。我们的研究结果表明，我们的方法可以大大减少临床环境中手动标注的需求，并可能促进新数据集的注释过程。

对无监督手术器械分割中低质量光流的重新思考