# POV-Surgery: A Dataset for Egocentric Hand and Tool Pose Estimation During Surgical Activities

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.10387 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10387/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jul 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [OpenPose: Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08008/) (2018)
- [End-to-End Human Pose and Mesh Reconstruction with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09760/) (2020)
- [GRAB: A Dataset of Whole-Body Human Grasping of Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.11200/) (2020)
- [Learning joint reconstruction of hands and manipulated objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05767/) (2019)
- [Assembly101: A Large-Scale Multi-View Video Dataset for Understanding Procedural Activities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14712/) (2022)
- [FreiHAND: A Dataset for Markerless Capture of Hand Pose and Shape from Single RGB Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04349/) (2019)
- [H2O: Two Hands Manipulating Objects for First Person Interaction Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11181/) (2021)
- [InterHand2.6M: A Dataset and Baseline for 3D Interacting Hand Pose Estimation from a Single RGB Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09309/) (2020)
- [First-Person Hand Action Benchmark with RGB-D Videos and 3D Hand Pose Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02463/) (2017)
- [Hand-Object Contact Consistency Reasoning for Human Grasps Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03304/) (2021)
- [Semi-Supervised 3D Hand-Object Poses Estimation with Interactions in Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05266/) (2021)
- [Capturing Hands in Action using Discriminative Salient Points and Physics Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02178/) (2015)
- [HandOccNet: Occlusion-Robust 3D Hand Mesh Estimation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14564/) (2022)
- [A real-time spatiotemporal AI model analyzes skill in open surgical videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07219/) (2021)
- [SurgeonAssist-Net: Towards Context-Aware Head-Mounted Display-Based Augmented Reality for Surgical Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06397/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [MM-OR: A Large Multimodal Operating Room Dataset for Semantic Understanding of High-Intensity Surgical Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02579/) (2025)
- [ORacle: Large Vision-Language Models for Knowledge-Guided Holistic OR Domain Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07031/) (2024)
- [Multimodal Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning for Egocentric Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19917/) (2024)
- [Reconstructing 4D Spatial Intelligence: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21045/) (2025)
- [Syn-Mediverse: A Multimodal Synthetic Dataset for Intelligent Scene Understanding of Healthcare Facilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03193/) (2023)
- [SurgeoNet: Realtime 3D Pose Estimation of Articulated Surgical Instruments from Stereo Images using a Synthetically-trained Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01293/) (2024)
- [Towards Dynamic 3D Reconstruction of Hand-Instrument Interaction in Ophthalmic Surgery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17677/) (2025)
- [AI-Enhanced Virtual Reality in Medicine: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03093/) (2024)
- [HUP-3D: A 3D multi-view synthetic dataset for assisted-egocentric hand-ultrasound pose estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09215/) (2024)
- [Estimating 2D Keypoints of Surgical Tools Using Vision-Language Models with Low-Rank Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.20830/) (2025)
- [Learning Egocentric In-Hand Object Segmentation through Weak Supervision from Human Narrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.26004/) (2025)
- [EgoEMS: A High-Fidelity Multimodal Egocentric Dataset for Cognitive Assistance in Emergency Medical Services](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.09894/) (2025)
- [Multi4D: High-Fidelity Dynamic Gaussian Splatting via Multi-Level Competitive Allocation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.22197/) (2026)
- [A Synthetic-Driven Vision System for Assembly Step Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00129/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The surgical usage of Mixed Reality (MR) has received growing attention in areas such as surgical navigation systems, skill assessment, and robot-assisted surgeries. For such applications, pose estimation for hand and surgical instruments from an egocentric perspective is a fundamental task and has been studied extensively in the computer vision field in recent years. However, the development of this field has been impeded by a lack of datasets, especially in the surgical field, where bloody gloves and reflective metallic tools make it hard to obtain 3D pose annotations for hands and objects using conventional methods. To address this issue, we propose POV-Surgery, a large-scale, synthetic, egocentric dataset focusing on pose estimation for hands with different surgical gloves and three orthopedic surgical instruments, namely scalpel, friem, and diskplacer. Our dataset consists of 53 sequences and 88,329 frames, featuring high-resolution RGB-D video streams with activity annotations, accurate 3D and 2D annotations for hand-object pose, and 2D hand-object segmentation masks. We fine-tune the current SOTA methods on POV-Surgery and further show the generalizability when applying to real-life cases with surgical gloves and tools by extensive evaluations. The code and the dataset are publicly available at batfacewayne.github.io/POV_Surgery_io/.