# Stitch-Inferencer: Enhance Endoscopic Video Segmentation and Tracking via Panoramic Reconstruction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14968 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.14968/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07919/) (2019)
- [Unified Perceptual Parsing for Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10221/) (2018)
- [SAM 3: Segment Anything with Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16719/) (2025)
- [PVT v2: Improved Baselines with Pyramid Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13797/) (2021)
- [LightGlue: Local Feature Matching at Light Speed](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13643/) (2023)
- [UNet++: Redesigning Skip Connections to Exploit Multiscale Features in Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05074/) (2019)
- [CoTracker3: Simpler and Better Point Tracking by Pseudo-Labelling Real Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11831/) (2024)
- [ALIKED: A Lighter Keypoint and Descriptor Extraction Network via Deformable Transformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03608/) (2023)
- [CholecSeg8k: A Semantic Segmentation Dataset for Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy Based on Cholec80](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12453/) (2020)
- [MFT: Long-Term Tracking of Every Pixel](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12998/) (2023)
- [SAR-RARP50: Segmentation of surgical instrumentation and Action Recognition on Robot-Assisted Radical Prostatectomy Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00496/) (2023)
- [Temporal Memory Attention for Video Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08643/) (2021)
- [m2caiSeg: Semantic Segmentation of Laparoscopic Images using Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10134/) (2020)
- [VideoMamba: Spatio-Temporal Selective State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08476/) (2024)
- [Medical SAM3: A Foundation Model for Universal Prompt-Driven Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10880/) (2026)
- [The Endoscapes Dataset for Surgical Scene Segmentation, Object Detection, and Critical View of Safety Assessment: Official Splits and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12429/) (2023)
- [SALI: Short-term Alignment and Long-term Interaction Network for Colonoscopy Video Polyp Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13532/) (2024)
- [A spatio-temporal network for video semantic segmentation in surgical videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11052/) (2023)
- [CholecInstanceSeg: A Tool Instance Segmentation Dataset for Laparoscopic Surgery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16039/) (2024)
- [Surgical Tattoos in Infrared: A Dataset for Quantifying Tissue Tracking and Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16782/) (2023)
- [SurgT challenge: Benchmark of Soft-Tissue Trackers for Robotic Surgery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03022/) (2023)
- [Video Dataset for Surgical Phase, Keypoint, and Instrument Recognition in Laparoscopic Surgery (PhaKIR)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.06549/) (2025)
- [SegCol Challenge: Semantic Segmentation for Tools and Fold Edges in Colonoscopy data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16078/) (2024)
- [NeuFlow v2: Push High-Efficiency Optical Flow To the Limit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10161/) (2024)
- [LiteTracker: Leveraging Temporal Causality for Accurate Low-latency Tissue Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09904/) (2025)
- [Cholec80-port: A Geometrically Consistent Trocar Port Segmentation Dataset for Robust Surgical Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.17060/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Surgical video understanding is fundamental to navigation systems. Endoscopic perception is often hindered by a limited field-of-view and frequent instrument occlusions, making spatio-temporal context essential for robust inference. These challenges have motivated video models that aggregate information across frames. However, existing video models typically store past observations implicitly in learned feature representations, often requiring task-specific video training, substantial annotated data, and increased computational cost. We propose Stitch-Inferencer, a real-time, model-agnostic inference framework that replaces implicit feature memory with an explicit image-space panoramic canvas. By stitching valid observations across frames, Stitch-Inferencer preserves previously observed pixels in an online, instrument-free view, expanding the effective field-of-view and providing direct access to regions that are temporarily occluded or absent from the current frame. Downstream segmentation or tracking models are applied to a compact region of interest on the panorama, and their predictions are reprojected to the current frame, enabling existing models to exploit long-range context without retraining. Experiments on anatomy segmentation and point/box tracking demonstrate consistent improvements across diverse baselines while preserving real-time throughput. The stitching module alone runs at over 60 FPS, providing a practical inference-time solution to enhance endoscopic perception in computationally constrained intraoperative environments. Source code will be made publicly available.