In this paper we present a new real-time visual servoing unit for laparoscopic surgery. This unit can automatically control laparoscope manipulator through visual tracking of laparoscopic surgical tool. For the tracking, we present two-stage adaptive CONDENSATION(conditional density propagation) algorithm to extract the accurate position of the surgical tool tip from a surgical image sequence in real-time. This algorithm can be adaptable to abrupt change of laparoscope illumination. For the control, we present virtual damper system to control a laparoscope manipulator safely and stably. This system causes the laparoscope to move under constraint of the virtual dampers which are linked to the four sides of image. The visual servoing unit operates the manipulator in real-time with locating the surgical tool in the center of image. The experimental results show that the proposed visual tracking algorithm is highly robust and the controlled manipulator can present stable view with safe.
