# Temporally Constrained Neural Networks (TCNN): A framework for semi-supervised video semantic segmentation Source: [Temporally Constrained Neural Networks (TCNN): A framework for semi-supervised video semantic segmentation]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2026-01-04T04:14:52.759Z Authors: Deepak Alapatt, Pietro Mascagni, Armine Vardazaryan, Alain Garcia, Nariaki Okamoto, Didier Mutter, Jacques Marescaux, Guido Costamagna, Bernard Dallemagne, Nicolas Padoy Published: 2021-12-27T18:06:12.000Z ## Abstract A major obstacle to building models for effective semantic segmentation, and particularly video semantic segmentation, is a lack of large and well annotated datasets. This bottleneck is particularly prohibitive in highly specialized and regulated fields such as medicine and surgery, where video semantic segmentation could have important applications but data and expert annotations are scarce. In these settings, temporal clues and anatomical constraints could be leveraged during training to improve performance. Here, we present Temporally Constrained Neural Networks (TCNN), a semi-supervised framework used for video semantic segmentation of surgical videos. In this work, we show that autoencoder networks can be used to efficiently provide both spatial and temporal supervisory signals to train deep learning models. We test our method on a newly introduced video dataset of laparoscopic cholecystectomy procedures, Endoscapes, and an adaptation of a public dataset of cataract surgeries, CaDIS. We demonstrate that lower-dimensional representations of predicted masks can be leveraged to provide a consistent improvement on both sparsely labeled datasets with no additional computational cost at inference time. Further, the TCNN framework is model-agnostic and can be used in conjunction with other model design choices with minimal additional complexity. ## Recorded benchmark results A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage. - [Video Semantic Segmentation on CaDIS](): Video Semantic Segmentation; CaDIS; F1 (Hand): 95.29. ## Original sources and implementation [Original paper]() [PDF]()