Sounding Surgical Instrument Localisation through Audio-Visual Correspondence

Dominic Behling, Jonas Hein, Matthias Seibold

Surgical scene understanding is a prerequisite for context-aware and intelligent systems in the operating room. Current methods rely mostly on visual data, while acoustic sensing has shown potential to provide complementary information on surgical activity. First approaches for the localisation of surgical activity relied on microphone arrays and acoustic beamforming. This work investigates whether the active instrument can be localized from a single microphone and a camera by learning the correspondence between the appearance and the sound of surgical instruments, without annotating its position. We adapt weakly supervised audio-visual localisation, which learns from the co-occurrence of image and sound, to the surgical setting. We record simulated surgical actions, sawing, drilling, and chiseling, and train the model on these recordings without any spatial annotation to produce a heatmap over the sounding tool. We extend the training objective by two terms: a silence term, which suppresses the output for silence and background noise, and a composite term, which trains the model to select the sounding one of two visible instruments. The model localizes the active instrument on…