Real-time localization of articulated surgical instruments in retinal microsurgery

•A method for instrument pose estimation in in-vivo RM sequences is proposed.•The main idea is the modeling of the surgical instrument as an articulated object.•By separating tracking and pose estimation, the method yields all joints in realtime.•The algorithm can generalize for changes in illumination, background and tool shape.•Evaluations on a public dataset imply that the method outperforms state-of-the-art.