LSD3K: A Benchmark for Smoke Removal from Laparoscopic Surgery Images

Smoke generated by surgical instruments during laparoscopic surgery can obscure the visual field, impairing surgeons' ability to perform operations accurately and safely. Thus, smoke removal task for laparoscopic images is highly desirable. Despite laparoscopic image desmoking has attracted the attention of researchers in recent years and several algorithms have emerged, the lack of publicly available high-quality benchmark datasets is the main bottleneck to hamper the development progress of this task. To advance this field, we construct a new high-quality dataset for Laparoscopic Surgery image Desmoking, named LSD3K, consisting of 3,000 paired synthetic non-homogeneous smoke images. In this paper, we provide a dataset generation pipeline, which includes modeling smoke shape using Blender, collecting ground-truth images from the Cholec80 dataset, random sampling of smoke masks and etc. Based on the proposed benchmark, we further conducted a comprehensive evaluation of the existing representative desmoking algorithms. The proposed dataset is publicly available at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1v0U5_3S4nJpaUiP898Q0pc-MfEAtnbOq/view?usp=sharing

UAV-Rain1k: A Benchmark for Raindrop Removal from UAV Aerial Imagery

Raindrops adhering to the lens of UAVs can obstruct visibility of the background scene and degrade image quality. Despite recent progress in image deraining methods and datasets, there is a lack of focus on raindrop removal from UAV aerial imagery due to the unique challenges posed by varying angles and rapid movement during drone flight. To fill the gap in this research, we first construct a new benchmark dataset for removing raindrops from UAV images, called UAV-Rain1k. In this letter, we provide a dataset generation pipeline, which includes modeling raindrop shapes using Blender, collecting background images from various UAV angles, random sampling of rain masks and etc. Based on the proposed benchmark, we further present a comprehensive evaluation of existing representative image deraining algorithms, and reveal future research opportunities worth exploring. The proposed dataset will be publicly available at https://github.com/cschenxiang/UAV-Rain1k.