We propose a novel framework for abnormal event detection in video that requires no training sequences. Our framework is based on unmasking, a technique previously used for authorship verification in text documents, which we adapt to our task. We iteratively train a binary classifier to distinguish between two consecutive video sequences while removing at each step the most discriminant features. Higher training accuracy rates of the intermediately obtained classifiers represent abnormal events. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to apply unmasking for a computer vision task. We compare our method with several state-of-the-art supervised and unsupervised methods on four benchmark data sets. The empirical results indicate that our abnormal event detection framework can achieve state-of-the-art results, while running in real-time at 20 frames per second.
 Real-time unusual event detection in video stream has been a difficult challenge due to the lack of sufficient training information, volatility of the definitions for both normality and abnormality, time constraints, and statistical limitation of the fitness of any parametric models. We propose a fully unsupervised dynamic sparse coding approach for detecting unusual events in videos based on online sparse re-constructibility of query signals from an atomically learned event dictionary, which forms a sparse coding bases. Based on an intuition that usual events in a video are more likely to be reconstructible from an event dictionary, whereas unusual events are not, our algorithm employs a principled convex optimization formulation that allows both a sparse reconstruction code, and an online dictionary to be jointly inferred and updated. Our algorithm is completely un-supervised, making no prior assumptions of what unusual events may look like and the settings of the cameras. The fact that the bases dictionary is updated in an online fashion as the algorithm observes more data, avoids any issues with concept drift. Experimental results on hours of real world surveillance video and several Youtube videos show that the proposed algorithm could reliably locate the unusual events in the video sequence, outperforming the current state-of-the-art methods.  A novel framework for anomaly detection in crowded scenes is presented. Three properties are identified as important for the design of a localized video representation suitable for anomaly detection in such scenes: 1) joint modeling of appearance and dynamics of the scene, and the abilities to detect 2) temporal, and 3) spatial abnormalities. The model for normal crowd behavior is based on mixtures of dynamic textures and outliers under this model are labeled as anomalies. Temporal anomalies are equated to events of low-probability, while spatial anomalies are handled using discriminant saliency. An experimental evaluation is conducted with a new dataset of crowded scenes, composed of 100 video sequences and five well defined abnormality categories. The proposed representation is shown to outperform various state of the art anomaly detection techniques. Anomaly detection is still a challenging task for video surveillance due to complex environments and unpredictable human behaviors. Most existing approaches train offline detectors using manually labeled data and predefined parameters, and are hard to model changing scenes. This paper introduces a neural network based model called online Growing Neural Gas (online GNG) to perform an unsupervised learning. Unlike a parameter-fixed GNG, our model updates learning parameters continuously, for which we propose several online neighbor-related strategies. Specific operations, namely neuron insertion, deletion, learning rate adaptation and stopping criteria selection, get upgraded to online modes. In the anomaly detection stage, the behavior patterns far away from our model are labeled as anomalous, for which far away is measured by a time-varying threshold. Experiments are implemented on three surveillance datasets, namely UMN, UCSD Ped1 Ped2 and Avenue dataset. All datasets have changing scenes due to mutable crowd density and behavior types. Anomaly detection results show that our model can adapt to the current scene rapidly and reduce false alarms while still detecting most anomalies. Quantitative comparisons with 12 recent approaches further confirm our superiority. HighlightsOnline GNG employs neighbor-related strategies to adjust dominant learning parameters in a fully automated way.Online GNG can estimate the learning efficiency and adjust the network size to fit the unstable data space dynamically.Online GNG effectively reduces the false alarms and leak detections caused by model aging which frequently happens in changing surveillance scenes. Detecting abnormalities in video is a challenging problem since the class of all irregular objects and behaviors is infinite and thus no (or by far not enough) abnormal training samples are available. Consequently, a standard setting is to find abnormalities without actually knowing what they are because we have not been shown abnormal examples during training. However, although the training data does not define what an abnormality looks like, the main paradigm in this field is to directly search for individual abnormal local patches or image regions independent of another. To address this problem we parse video frames by establishing a set of hypotheses that jointly explain all the foreground while, at same time, trying to find normal training samples that explain the hypotheses. Consequently, we can avoid a direct detection of abnormalities. They are discovered indirectly as those hypotheses which are needed for covering the foreground without finding an explanation by normal samples for themselves. We present a probabilistic model that localizes abnormalities using statistical inference. On the challenging dataset of [15] it outperforms the state-of-the-art by 7 to achieve a frame-based abnormality classification performance of 91 and the localization performance improves by 32 to 76 . We propose a space-time Markov random field (MRF) model to detect abnormal activities in video. The nodes in the MRF graph correspond to a grid of local regions in the video frames, and neighboring nodes in both space and time are associated with links. To learn normal patterns of activity at each local node, we capture the distribution of its typical optical flow with a mixture of probabilistic principal component analyzers. For any new optical flow patterns detected in incoming video clips, we use the learned model and MRF graph to compute a maximum a posteriori estimate of the degree of normality at each local node. Further, we show how to incrementally update the current model parameters as new video observations stream in, so that the model can efficiently adapt to visual context changes over a long period of time. Experimental results on surveillance videos show that our space-time MRF model robustly detects abnormal activities both in a local and global sense: not only does it accurately localize the atomic abnormal activities in a crowded video, but at the same time it captures the global-level abnormalities caused by irregular interactions between local activities. We present an unsupervised approach for abnormal event detection in videos. We propose, given a dictionary of features learned from local spatiotemporal cuboids using the sparse coding objective, the abnormality of an event depends jointly on two factors: the frequency of each feature in reconstructing all events (or, rarity of a feature) and the strength by which it is used in reconstructing the current event (or, the absolute coefficient). The Incremental Coding Length (ICL) of a feature is a measure of its entropy gain. Given a dictionary, the ICL computation does not involve any parameter, is computationally efficient and has been used for saliency detection in images with impressive results. In this paper, the rarity of a dictionary feature is learned online as its average energy, a function of its ICL. The proposed approach is applicable to real world streaming videos. Experiments on three benchmark datasets and evaluations in comparison with a number of mainstream algorithms show that the approach is comparable to the state-of-the-art. We propose to detect abnormal events via a sparse reconstruction over the normal bases. Given an over-complete normal basis set (e.g., an image sequence or a collection of local spatio-temporal patches), we introduce the sparse reconstruction cost (SRC) over the normal dictionary to measure the normalness of the testing sample. To condense the size of the dictionary, a novel dictionary selection method is designed with sparsity consistency constraint. By introducing the prior weight of each basis during sparse reconstruction, the proposed SRC is more robust compared to other outlier detection criteria. Our method provides a unified solution to detect both local abnormal events (LAE) and global abnormal events (GAE). We further extend it to support online abnormal event detection by updating the dictionary incrementally. Experiments on three benchmark datasets and the comparison to the state-of-the-art methods validate the advantages of our algorithm. In this paper we introduce a novel method to detect and localize abnormal behaviors in crowd videos using Social Force model. For this purpose, a grid of particles is placed over the image and it is advected with the space-time average of optical flow. By treating the moving particles as individuals, their interaction forces are estimated using social force model. The interaction force is then mapped into the image plane to obtain Force Flow for every pixel in every frame. Randomly selected spatio-temporal volumes of Force Flow are used to model the normal behavior of the crowd. We classify frames as normal and abnormal by using a bag of words approach. The regions of anomalies in the abnormal frames are localized using interaction forces. The experiments are conducted on a publicly available dataset from University of Minnesota for escape panic scenarios and a challenging dataset of crowd videos taken from the web. The experiments show that the proposed method captures the dynamics of the crowd behavior successfully. In addition, we have shown that the social force approach outperforms similar approaches based on pure optical flow. We present a novel unsupervised deep learning framework for anomalous event detection in complex video scenes. While most existing works merely use hand-crafted appearance and motion features, we propose Appearance and Motion DeepNet (AMDN) which utilizes deep neural networks to automatically learn feature representations. To exploit the complementary information of both appearance and motion patterns, we introduce a novel double fusion framework, combining both the benefits of traditional early fusion and late fusion strategies. Specifically, stacked denoising autoencoders are proposed to separately learn both appearance and motion features as well as a joint representation (early fusion). Based on the learned representations, multiple one-class SVM models are used to predict the anomaly scores of each input, which are then integrated with a late fusion strategy for final anomaly detection. We evaluate the proposed method on two publicly available video surveillance datasets, showing competitive performance with respect to state of the art approaches.  This paper presents a hierarchical framework for detecting local and global anomalies via hierarchical feature representation and Gaussian process regression. While local anomaly is typically detected as a 3D pattern matching problem, we are more interested in global anomaly that involves multiple normal events interacting in an unusual manner such as car accident. To simultaneously detect local and global anomalies, we formulate the extraction of normal interactions from training video as the problem of efficiently finding the frequent geometric relations of the nearby sparse spatio-temporal interest points. A codebook of interaction templates is then constructed and modeled using Gaussian process regression. A novel inference method for computing the likelihood of an observed interaction is also proposed. As such, our model is robust to slight topological deformations and can handle the noise and data unbalance problems in the training data. Simulations show that our system outperforms the main state-of-the-art methods on this topic and achieves at least 80 detection rates based on three challenging datasets. Speedy abnormal event detection meets the growing demand to process an enormous number of surveillance videos. Based on inherent redundancy of video structures, we propose an efficient sparse combination learning framework. It achieves decent performance in the detection phase without compromising result quality. The short running time is guaranteed because the new method effectively turns the original complicated problem to one in which only a few costless small-scale least square optimization steps are involved. Our method reaches high detection rates on benchmark datasets at a speed of 140-150 frames per second on average when computing on an ordinary desktop PC using MATLAB.