DGGAN: Degradation Guided Generative Adversarial Network for Real-time Endoscopic Video Enhancement

TL;DR

This paper introduces a real-time endoscopic video enhancement method that uses degradation-aware deep learning to improve image quality during surgery, balancing performance and computational efficiency.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel degradation-aware framework that propagates degradation representations across frames for real-time endoscopic video enhancement, improving robustness and efficiency.

Findings

Achieves superior performance-efficiency balance compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Utilizes contrastive learning to extract degradation representations effectively.

Demonstrates robustness and generalization in clinical-like scenarios.

Abstract

Endoscopic surgery relies on intraoperative video, making image quality a decisive factor for surgical safety and efficacy. Yet, endoscopic videos are often degraded by uneven illumination, tissue scattering, occlusions, and motion blur, which obscure critical anatomical details and complicate surgical manipulation. Although deep learning-based methods have shown promise in image enhancement, most existing approaches remain too computationally demanding for real-time surgical use. To address this challenge, we propose a degradation-aware framework for endoscopic video enhancement, which enables real-time, high-quality enhancement by propagating degradation representations across frames. In our framework, degradation representations are first extracted from images using contrastive learning. We then introduce a fusion mechanism that modulates image features with these representations to guide a single-frame enhancement model, which is trained with a cycle-consistency constraint between degraded and restored images to improve robustness and generalization. Experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves a superior balance between performance and efficiency compared with several state-of-the-art methods. These results highlight the effectiveness of degradation-aware modeling for real-time endoscopic video enhancement. Nevertheless, our method suggests that implicitly learning and propagating degradation representation offer a practical pathway for clinical application.