# A Smoke Removal Method for Laparoscopic Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.08410 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08410/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 22 Mar 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Event Recognition in Laparoscopic Gynecology Videos with Hybrid Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00593/) (2023)
- [Action Recognition in Video Recordings from Gynecologic Laparoscopy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18666/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In laparoscopic surgery, image quality can be severely degraded by surgical smoke, which not only introduces error for the image processing (used in image guided surgery), but also reduces the visibility of the surgeons. In this paper, we propose to enhance the laparoscopic images by decomposing them into unwanted smoke part and enhanced part using a variational approach. The proposed method relies on the observation that smoke has low contrast and low inter-channel differences. A cost function is defined based on this prior knowledge and is solved using an augmented Lagrangian method. The obtained unwanted smoke component is then subtracted from the original degraded image, resulting in the enhanced image. The obtained quantitative scores in terms of FADE, JNBM and RE metrics show that our proposed method performs rather well. Furthermore, the qualitative visual inspection of the results show that it removes smoke effectively from the laparoscopic images.