Real-time Rendering-based Surgical Instrument Tracking via Evolutionary Optimization

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Hu, Hanyang, Liang, Zekai, Richter, Florian, Yip, Michael C.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Hu, Hanyang
Liang, Zekai
Richter, Florian
Yip, Michael C.
author_facet Hu, Hanyang
Liang, Zekai
Richter, Florian
Yip, Michael C.
contents Accurate and efficient tracking of surgical instruments is fundamental for Robot-Assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery. Although vision-based robot pose estimation has enabled markerless calibration without tedious physical setups, reliable tool tracking for surgical robots still remains challenging due to partial visibility and specialized articulation design of surgical instruments. Previous works in the field are usually prone to unreliable feature detections under degraded visual quality and data scarcity, whereas rendering-based methods often struggle with computational costs and suboptimal convergence. In this work, we incorporate CMA-ES, an evolutionary optimization strategy, into a versatile tracking pipeline that jointly estimates surgical instrument pose and joint configurations. Using batch rendering to efficiently evaluate multiple pose candidates in parallel, the method significantly reduces inference time and improves convergence robustness. The proposed framework further generalizes to joint angle-free and bi-manual tracking settings, making it suitable for both vision feedback control and online surgery video calibration. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms prior approaches in both accuracy and runtime.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_11404
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Real-time Rendering-based Surgical Instrument Tracking via Evolutionary Optimization
Hu, Hanyang
Liang, Zekai
Richter, Florian
Yip, Michael C.
Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Accurate and efficient tracking of surgical instruments is fundamental for Robot-Assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery. Although vision-based robot pose estimation has enabled markerless calibration without tedious physical setups, reliable tool tracking for surgical robots still remains challenging due to partial visibility and specialized articulation design of surgical instruments. Previous works in the field are usually prone to unreliable feature detections under degraded visual quality and data scarcity, whereas rendering-based methods often struggle with computational costs and suboptimal convergence. In this work, we incorporate CMA-ES, an evolutionary optimization strategy, into a versatile tracking pipeline that jointly estimates surgical instrument pose and joint configurations. Using batch rendering to efficiently evaluate multiple pose candidates in parallel, the method significantly reduces inference time and improves convergence robustness. The proposed framework further generalizes to joint angle-free and bi-manual tracking settings, making it suitable for both vision feedback control and online surgery video calibration. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms prior approaches in both accuracy and runtime.
title Real-time Rendering-based Surgical Instrument Tracking via Evolutionary Optimization
topic Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.11404