VisionBlender: a tool to efficiently generate computer vision datasets for robotic surgery

Abstract

ABSTRACT Surgical robots rely on robust and efficient computer vision algorithms to be able to intervene in real-time. The main problem, however, is that the training or testing of such algorithms, especially when using deep learning techniques, requires large endoscopic datasets which are challenging to obtain, since they require expensive hardware, ethical approvals, patient consent and access to hospitals. This paper presents VisionBlender, a solution to efficiently generate large and accurate endoscopic datasets for validating surgical vision algorithms. VisionBlender is a synthetic dataset generator that adds a user interface to Blender, allowing users to generate realistic video sequences with ground truth maps of depth, disparity, segmentation masks, surface normals, optical flow, object pose, and camera parameters. VisionBlender was built with special focus on robotic surgery, and examples of endoscopic data that can be generated using this tool are presented. Possible applications are also discussed, and here we present one of those applications where the generated data has been used to train and evaluate state-of-the-art 3D reconstruction algorithms. Being able to generate realistic endoscopic datasets efficiently, VisionBlender promises an exciting step forward in robotic surgery.