Jul 14, 2026cs.CV
Robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery (MIS) critically depends on reliable endoscopic perception for navigation and safety. However, conventional endoscopes provide only a limited field of view, leaving large portions of the surrounding anatomy unobserved. Recent neural rendering approaches, such as Neural Radiance Fields and 3D Gaussian Splatting, enable novel view synthesis from endoscopic videos, but their reliance on sparse observations often leads to severe artifacts when extrapolating beyond the training trajectory. In this work, we propose ExtraGS, a framework for enhancing endoscopic view extrapolation through diffusion-guided 3D Gaussian Splatting. Starting from an initial reconstruction, we introduce an uncertainty-guided virtual camera sampling strategy to actively explore blind spots and maximize information gain. The rendered views from these sampled locations are refined using a diffusion model to recover plausible anatomical structures, producing pseudo-observations that guide further optimization. To prevent the generated content from degrading reliable regions, we adopt a confidence-weighted fine-tuning strategy when incorporating these pseudo-observations. Extensive experiments on multiple public endoscopic datasets demonstrate that ExtraGS significantly reduces extrapolation artifacts and achieves state-of-the-art performance in endoscopic novel view synthesis.
Cheng-Tai Hsieh, Jiwei Shan, Han Fang +6
School of Automation and Intelligent Sensing, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and the Shanghai Key Laboratory of Navigation and Location-Based Services, Shanghai, China · Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering and the T Stone Robotics Institute, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong · Global College, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China +1