  In this paper we deal with the problem of predicting action progress in
videos. We argue that this is an extremely important task since it can be
valuable for a wide range of interaction applications. To this end we introduce
a novel approach, named ProgressNet, capable of predicting when an action takes
place in a video, where it is located within the frames, and how far it has
progressed during its execution. To provide a general definition of action
progress, we ground our work in the linguistics literature, borrowing terms and
concepts to understand which actions can be the subject of progress estimation.
As a result, we define a categorization of actions and their phases. Motivated
by the recent success obtained from the interaction of Convolutional and
Recurrent Neural Networks, our model is based on a combination of the Faster
R-CNN framework, to make frame-wise predictions, and LSTM networks, to estimate
action progress through time. After introducing two evaluation protocols for
the task at hand, we demonstrate the capability of our model to effectively
predict action progress on the UCF-101 and J-HMDB datasets.
