Pixel-wise recognition for holistic surgical scene understanding

This paper presents the Holistic and Multi-Granular Surgical Scene Understanding of Prostatectomies (GraSP) dataset, a curated benchmark that models surgical scene understanding as a hierarchy of complementary tasks with varying levels of granularity. Our approach encompasses long-term tasks, such as surgical phase and step recognition, and short-term tasks, including surgical instrument segmentation and atomic visual actions detection. To exploit our proposed benchmark, we introduce the Transformers for Actions, Phases, Steps, and Instrument Segmentation (TAPIS) model, a general architecture that combines a global video feature extractor with localized region proposals from an instrument segmentation model to tackle the multi-granularity of our benchmark. We demonstrate TAPIS's versatility and state-of-the-art performance across different tasks through extensive experimentation on GraSP and alternative benchmarks. This work represents a foundational step forward in Endoscopic Vision, offering a novel framework for future research towards holistic surgical scene understanding.