Activity recognition in surgical videos is a key research area for developing next-generation devices and workflow monitoring systems. Since surgeries are long processes with highly-variable lengths, deep learning models used for surgical videos often consist of a two-stage setup using a backbone and temporal sequence model. In this paper, we investigate many state-of-the-art backbones and temporal models to find architectures that yield the strongest performance for surgical activity recognition. We first benchmark the models performance on a large-scale activity recognition dataset containing over 800 surgery videos captured in multiple clinical operating rooms. We further evaluate the models on the two smaller public datasets, the Cholec80 and Cataract-101 datasets, containing only 80 and 101 videos respectively. We empirically found that Swin-Transformer+BiGRU temporal model yielded strong performance on both datasets. Finally, we investigate the adaptability of the model to new domains by fine-tuning models to a new hospital and experimenting with a recent unsupervised domain adaptation approach.
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