  The temporal segmentation of events is an essential task and a precursor for
the automatic recognition of human actions in the video. Several attempts have
been made to capture frame-level salient aspects through attention but they
lack the capacity to effectively map the temporal relationships in between the
frames as they only capture a limited span of temporal dependencies. To this
end we propose a complete end-to-end supervised learning approach that can
better learn relationships between actions over time, thus improving the
overall segmentation performance. The proposed hierarchical recurrent attention
framework analyses the input video at multiple temporal scales, to form
embeddings at frame level and segment level, and perform fine-grained action
segmentation. This generates a simple, lightweight, yet extremely effective
architecture for segmenting continuous video streams and has multiple
application domains. We evaluate our system on multiple challenging public
benchmark datasets, including MERL Shopping, 50 salads, and Georgia Tech
Egocentric datasets, and achieves state-of-the-art performance. The evaluated
datasets encompass numerous video capture settings which are inclusive of
static overhead camera views and dynamic, ego-centric head-mounted camera
views, demonstrating the direct applicability of the proposed framework in a
variety of settings.
