Anomaly Detection in Video

Anomaly detection is an area of video analysis that has great importance in automated surveillance. Although it has been extensively studied, there has been little work on using deep convolutional neural networks to learn spatio-temporal feature representations. In this thesis we present novel approaches for learning motion features and modelling normal spatio-temporal dynamics for anomaly detection. The contributions are divided into two main chapters. The first introduces a method that uses a convolutional autoencoder to learn motion features from foreground optical flow patches. The autoencoder is coupled with a spatial sparsity constraint, known as Winner-Take-All, to learn shift-invariant and generic flow-features. This method solves the problem of using hand-crafted feature representations in state of the art methods. Moreover, to capture variations in scale of the patterns of motion as an object moves in depth through the scene,we also divide the image plane into regions and learn a separate normality model in each region. We compare the methods with state of the art approaches on two datasets and demonstrate improved performance.
The second main chapter presents a end-to-end method that learns normal spatio-temporal dynamics from video volumes using a sequence-to-sequence encoder-decoder for prediction and reconstruction. This work is based on the intuition that the encoder-decoder learns to estimate normal sequences in a training set with low error, thus it estimates an abnormal sequence with high error. Error between the network's output and the target is used to classify a video volume as normal or abnormal. In addition to the use of reconstruction error, we also use prediction error for anomaly detection.
We evaluate the second method on three datasets. The prediction models show comparable performance with state of the art methods. In comparison with the first proposed method, performance is improved in one dataset. Moreover, running time is significantly faster.