Semantic-Coupled Perception Framework for Autonomous Laparoscope Control

Abstract

In minimally invasive surgery (MIS), maintaining an appropriate field of view (FoV) is essential for surgical safety and efficiency. However, conventional autonomous laparoscope control methods often treat visual tracking and surgical phase recognition independently, limiting robustness under occlusion, entity overlap, and camera motion. This paper proposes a closed-loop autonomous laparoscope control framework that couples real-time surgical phase recognition with camera-motion-compensated visual perception. By exploiting phase-dependent relationships among surgical entities, the framework improves target state estimation under challenging visual conditions, supporting task-aware autonomous FoV control. Experiments on benchmark datasets evaluate the proposed framework in surgical phase recognition and target tracking, including scenarios involving occlusion and entity overlap. Phantom experiments further demonstrate the feasibility of autonomous FoV control, showing improved target visibility and task execution performance compared with fixed-FoV control. These results highlight the potential of incorporating task-level semantics into visual state estimation for autonomous laparoscope guidance.

arXiv comment8 pages, 5 figures. Submitted to IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) for possible publication