GLSFormer: Gated - Long, Short Sequence Transformer for Step Recognition
  in Surgical Videos
Nisarg A. Shah Shameema Sikder S. Swaroop Vedula Vishal M. Patel
Automated surgical step recognition is an important task that can
significantly improve patient safety and decision-making during surgeries.
Existing state-of-the-art methods for surgical step recognition either rely on
separate, multi-stage modeling of spatial and temporal information or operate
on short-range temporal resolution when learned jointly. However, the benefits
of joint modeling of spatio-temporal features and long-range information are
not taken in account. In this paper, we propose a vision transformer-based
approach to jointly learn spatio-temporal features directly from sequence of
frame-level patches. Our method incorporates a gated-temporal attention
mechanism that intelligently combines short-term and long-term spatio-temporal
feature representations. We extensively evaluate our approach on two cataract
surgery video datasets, namely Cataract-101 and D99, and demonstrate superior
performance compared to various state-of-the-art methods. These results
validate the suitability of our proposed approach for automated surgical step
recognition. Our code is released at:
https://github.com/nisargshah1999/GLSFormer