Video anomaly detection (VAD) identifies suspicious events in videos, which is critical for crime prevention and homeland security. In this paper, we propose a simple but highly effective VAD method that relies on attribute-based representations. The base version of our method represents every object by its velocity and pose, and computes anomaly scores by density estimation. Surprisingly, this simple representation is sufficient to achieve state-of-the-art performance in ShanghaiTech, the most commonly used VAD dataset. Combining our attribute-based representations with an off-the-shelf, pretrained deep representation yields state-of-the-art performance with a $99.1\%, 93.7\%$, and $85.9\%$ AUROC on Ped2, Avenue, and ShanghaiTech, respectively.
Video anomaly detection is an ill-posed problem because it relies on many parameters such as appearance, pose, camera angle, background, and more. We distill the problem to anomaly detection of human pose, thus decreasing the risk of nuisance parameters such as appearance affecting the result. Focusing on pose alone also has the side benefit of reducing bias against distinct minority groups. Our model works directly on human pose graph sequences and is exceptionally lightweight (~1K parameters), capable of running on any machine able to run the pose estimation with negligible additional resources. We leverage the highly compact pose representation in a normalizing flows framework, which we extend to tackle the unique characteristics of spatio-temporal pose data and show its advantages in this use case. The algorithm is quite general and can handle training data of only normal examples as well as a supervised setting that consists of labeled normal and abnormal examples. We report state-of-the-art results on two anomaly detection benchmarks - the unsupervised ShanghaiTech dataset and the recent supervised UBnormal dataset.
Video anomaly detection (VAD) mainly refers to identifying anomalous events that have not occurred in the training set where only normal samples are available. Existing works usually formulate VAD as a reconstruction or prediction problem. However, the adaptability and scalability of these methods are limited. In this paper, we propose a novel distance-based VAD method to take advantage of all the available normal data efficiently and flexibly. In our method, the smaller the distance between a testing sample and normal samples, the higher the probability that the testing sample is normal. Specifically, we propose to use locality-sensitive hashing (LSH) to map samples whose similarity exceeds a certain threshold into the same bucket in advance. In this manner, the complexity of near neighbor search is cut down significantly. To make the samples that are semantically similar get closer and samples not similar get further apart, we propose a novel learnable version of LSH that embeds LSH into a neural network and optimizes the hash functions with contrastive learning strategy. The proposed method is robust to data imbalance and can handle the large intra-class variations in normal data flexibly. Besides, it has a good ability of scalability. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method, which achieves new state-of-the-art results on VAD benchmarks.
Abnormal event detection in video is a complex computer vision problem that has attracted significant attention in recent years. The complexity of the task arises from the commonly-adopted definition of an abnormal event, that is, a rarely occurring event that typically depends on the surrounding context. Following the standard formulation of abnormal event detection as outlier detection, we propose a background-agnostic framework that learns from training videos containing only normal events. Our framework is composed of an object detector, a set of appearance and motion auto-encoders, and a set of classifiers. Since our framework only looks at object detections, it can be applied to different scenes, provided that normal events are defined identically across scenes and that the single main factor of variation is the background. To overcome the lack of abnormal data during training, we propose an adversarial learning strategy for the auto-encoders. We create a scene-agnostic set of out-of-domain pseudo-abnormal examples, which are correctly reconstructed by the auto-encoders before applying gradient ascent on the pseudo-abnormal examples. We further utilize the pseudo-abnormal examples to serve as abnormal examples when training appearance-based and motion-based binary classifiers to discriminate between normal and abnormal latent features and reconstructions. We compare our framework with the state-of-the-art methods on four benchmark data sets, using various evaluation metrics. Compared to existing methods, the empirical results indicate that our approach achieves favorable performance on all data sets. In addition, we provide region-based and track-based annotations for two large-scale abnormal event detection data sets from the literature, namely ShanghaiTech and Subway.