This paper proposes a method based on repulsive forces and sparse reconstruction for the detection and location of abnormal events in crowded scenes. In order to avoid the challenging problem of accurately tracking each specific individual in a dense or complex scene, we divide each frame of the surveillance video into a fixed number of grids and select a single representative point in each grid as the individual to track. The repulsive force model, which can accurately reflect interactive behaviors of crowds, is used to calculate the interactive forces between grid particles in crowded scenes and to construct a force flow matrix using these discrete forces from a fixed number of continuous frames. The force flow matrix, which contains spatial and temporal information, is adopted to train a group of visual dictionaries by sparse coding. To further improve the detection efficiency and avoid concept drift, we propose a fully unsupervised global and local dynamic updating algorithm, based on sparse reconstruction and a group of word pools. For anomaly location, since our method is based on a fixed grid, we can judge whether anomalies occur in a region intuitively according to the reconstruction error of the corresponding visual words. We experimentally verify the proposed method using the UMN dataset, the UCSD dataset and the Web dataset separately. The results indicate that our method can not only detect abnormal events accurately, but can also pinpoint the location of anomalies.
Actions are spatio-temporal patterns which can be characterized by collections of spatio-temporal invariant features. Detection of actions is to find the re-occurrences (e.g. through pattern matching) of such spatio-temporal patterns. This paper addresses two critical issues in pattern matching-based action detection: (1) efficiency of pattern search in 3D videos and (2) tolerance of intra-pattern variations of actions. Our contributions are two-fold. First, we propose a discriminative pattern matching called naive-Bayes based mutual information maximization (NBMIM) for multi-class action categorization. It improves the state-of-the-art results on standard KTH dataset. Second, a novel search algorithm is proposed to locate the optimal subvolume in the 3D video space for efficient action detection. Our method is purely data-driven and does not rely on object detection, tracking or background subtraction. It can well handle the intra-pattern variations of actions such as scale and speed variations, and is insensitive to dynamic and clutter backgrounds and even partial occlusions. The experiments on versatile datasets including KTH and CMU action datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method.  In this paper, we present a method for recognizing human activity from linguistic summarizations of temporal fuzzy inference curves representing the states of a three-dimensional object called voxel person. A hierarchy of fuzzy logic is used, where the output from each level is summarized and fed into the next level. We present a two level model for fall detection. The first level infers the states of the person at each image. The second level operates on linguistic summarizations of voxel person's states and inference regarding activity is performed. The rules used for fall detection were designed under the supervision of nurses to ensure that they reflect the manner in which elders perform these activities. The proposed framework is extremely flexible. Rules can be modified, added, or removed, allowing for per-resident customization based on knowledge about their cognitive and physical ability. In this paper we propose a novel method to detect and record various posture-based events of interest in a typical elderly monitoring application in a home surveillance scenario. These events include standing, sitting, bending squatting, side lying and lying toward the camera. The projection histograms of segmented human body silhouette are used as the main feature vector for posture classification. k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) algorithm and evidence accumulation technique is proposed to infer human postures. With this technique we have achieved a robust recognition rate of above 90 and a stable classifier's output. The modified classifier structure also improves greatly the recognition rate of lying toward the camera events as compared to the result of classifier's structure in GHOST (, 1998). Furthermore, we use the speed of fall to differentiate real fall incident and an event where the person is simply lying without falling. We propose a novel unsupervised learning framework to model activities and interactions in crowded and complicated scenes. Hierarchical Bayesian models are used to connect three elements in visual surveillance: low-level visual features, simple "atomic" activities, and interactions. Atomic activities are modeled as distributions over low-level visual features, and multi-agent interactions are modeled as distributions over atomic activities. These models are learnt in an unsupervised way. Given a long video sequence, moving pixels are clustered into different atomic activities and short video clips are clustered into different interactions. In this paper, we propose three hierarchical Bayesian models, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) mixture model, Hierarchical Dirichlet Process (HDP) mixture model, and Dual Hierarchical Dirichlet Processes (Dual-HDP) model. They advance existing language models, such as LDA [1] and HDP [2]. Our data sets are challenging video sequences from crowded traffic scenes and train station scenes with many kinds of activities co-occurring. Without tracking and human labeling effort, our framework completes many challenging visual surveillance tasks of board interest such as: (1) discovering typical atomic activities and interactions; (2) segmenting long video sequences into different interactions; (3) segmenting motions into different activities; (4) detecting abnormality; and (5) supporting high-level queries on activities and interactions. We study the question of feature sets for robust visual object recognition; adopting linear SVM based human detection as a test case. After reviewing existing edge and gradient based descriptors, we show experimentally that grids of histograms of oriented gradient (HOG) descriptors significantly outperform existing feature sets for human detection. We study the influence of each stage of the computation on performance, concluding that fine-scale gradients, fine orientation binning, relatively coarse spatial binning, and high-quality local contrast normalization in overlapping descriptor blocks are all important for good results. The new approach gives near-perfect separation on the original MIT pedestrian database, so we introduce a more challenging dataset containing over 1800 annotated human images with a large range of pose variations and backgrounds. In this paper, we present a novel algorithm based on flow velocity field estimation to count the number of pedestrians across a detection line or inside a specified region. We regard pedestrians across the line as fluid flow, and design a novel model to estimate the flow velocity field. By integrating over time, the dynamic mosaics are constructed to count the number of pixels and edges passed through the line. Consequentially, the number of pedestrians can be estimated by quadratic regression, with the number of weighted pixels and edges as input. The regressors are learned off line from several camera tilt angles, and have taken the calibration information into account. We use tilt-angle-specific learning to ensure direct deployment and avoid overfitting while the commonly used scene-specific learning scheme needs on-site annotation and always trends to overfitting. Experiments on a variety of videos verified that the proposed method can give accurate estimation under different camera setup in real-time.  This paper describes a probabilistic syntactic approach to the detection and recognition of temporally extended activities and interactions between multiple agents. A complete system consisting of an adaptive tracker, an event generator and the parser performs segmentation and labelling of a surveillance video of a parking lot; the system correctly identifies activities such as pick-up and drop-off, which involve person-vehicle interactions. The main contributions of this paper are extending the parsing algorithm to handle multi-agent interactions within a single parser, providing a general mechanism for consistency-based pruning, and developing an efficient incremental parsing algorithm.