iMED: A Multi-Endoscope Dataset for Surgical 3D Perception

arXiv:2611.04755v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce iMED, the first synchronized multi-endoscope dataset for robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery (RAMIS), designed to address a fundamental limitation in surgical vision benchmarking: the absence of independent held-out viewpoints. Existing surgical datasets capture single-trajectory sequences from a single endoscope, making it impossible to distinguish geometric generalization from photometric interpolation along a narrow forward-facing path. iMED provides 340 sequences ~170K synchronized timepoints with 4 views per timepoint) recorded simultaneously from two independent stereo endoscopes across ex vivo, postmortem, and live surgical settings, spanning 14 specimens with diverse anatomical regions and motion regimes. The dataset includes calibrated camera intrinsics, ArUco-based frame-wise pose estimates with uncertainty quantification, instrument segmentation masks, and rich clinical metadata. Using a train-on-one-endoscope, test-on-another evaluation protocol, we benchmark 23 state-of-the-art methods across rigid and deformable novel view synthesis, pose estimation, feature matching, and monocular depth estimation. Our experiments show that methods relying primarily on photometric supervision degrade substantially under this held-out-endoscope setting, while methods with explicit geometric regularization are more robust across views in our benchmark. Notably, large-scale foundation models transfer surprisingly well to surgical imagery, often outperforming domain-specific models, suggesting pitfalls in current fine-tuning protocols. iMED establishes a new evaluation protocol for geometric generalization in surgical vision.