This paper addresses the problem of joint detection and recounting of abnormal events in videos. Recounting of abnormal events, i.e., explaining why they are judged to be abnormal, is an unexplored but critical task in video surveillance, because it helps human observers quickly judge if they are false alarms or not. To describe the events in the human-understandable form for event recounting, learning generic knowledge about visual concepts (e.g., object and action) is crucial. Although convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved promising results in learning such concepts, it remains an open question as to how to effectively use CNNs for abnormal event detection, mainly due to the environment-dependent nature of the anomaly detection. In this paper, we tackle this problem by integrating a generic CNN model and environment-dependent anomaly detectors. Our approach first learns CNN with multiple visual tasks to exploit semantic information that is useful for detecting and recounting abnormal events. By appropriately plugging the model into anomaly detectors, we can detect and recount abnormal events while taking advantage of the discriminative power of CNNs. Our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art on Avenue and UCSD Ped2 benchmarks for abnormal event detection and also produces promising results of abnormal event recounting.
The detection and localization of anomalous behaviors in crowded scenes is considered, and a joint detector of temporal and spatial anomalies is proposed. The proposed detector is based on a video representation that accounts for both appearance and dynamics, using a set of mixture of dynamic textures models. These models are used to implement 1) a center-surround discriminant saliency detector that produces spatial saliency scores, and 2) a model of normal behavior that is learned from training data and produces temporal saliency scores. Spatial and temporal anomaly maps are then defined at multiple spatial scales, by considering the scores of these operators at progressively larger regions of support. The multiscale scores act as potentials of a conditional random field that guarantees global consistency of the anomaly judgments. A data set of densely crowded pedestrian walkways is introduced and used to evaluate the proposed anomaly detector. Experiments on this and other data sets show that the latter achieves state-of-the-art anomaly detection results. 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 explore a location based approach for behavior modeling and abnormality detection. In contrast to the conventional object based approach where an object may first be tagged, identified, classified, and tracked, we proceed directly with event characterization and behavior modeling at the pixel(s) level based on motion labels obtained from background subtraction. Since events are temporally and spatially dependent, this calls for techniques that account for statistics of spatiotemporal events. Based on motion labels, we learn co-occurrence statistics for normal events across space-time. For one (or many) key pixel(s), we estimate a co-occurrence matrix that accounts for any two active labels which co-occur simultaneously within the same spatiotemporal volume. This co-occurrence matrix is then used as a potential function in a Markov random field (MRF) model to describe the probability of observations within the same spatiotemporal volume. The MRF distribution implicitly accounts for speed, direction, as well as the average size of the objects passing in front of each key pixel. Furthermore, when the spatiotemporal volume is large enough, the co-occurrence distribution contains the average normal path followed by moving objects. The learned normal co-occurrence distribution can be used for abnormal detection. Our method has been tested on various outdoor videos representing various challenges. Extremely crowded scenes present unique challenges to video analysis that cannot be addressed with conventional approaches. We present a novel statistical framework for modeling the local spatio-temporal motion pattern behavior of extremely crowded scenes. Our key insight is to exploit the dense activity of the crowded scene by modeling the rich motion patterns in local areas, effectively capturing the underlying intrinsic structure they form in the video. In other words, we model the motion variation of local space-time volumes and their spatial-temporal statistical behaviors to characterize the overall behavior of the scene. We demonstrate that by capturing the steady-state motion behavior with these spatio-temporal motion pattern models, we can naturally detect unusual activity as statistical deviations. Our experiments show that local spatio-temporal motion pattern modeling offers promising results in real-world scenes with complex activities that are hard for even human observers to analyze.