1. A method for detecting short term, unusual events in a video, comprising the steps of: extracting features from the video; labeling segments of the video according to the features; applying a global sliding window to the labeled segments determine global characteristics over time, while applying a local sliding window to only the labeled segments of the global sliding window to determine local characteristic over time, wherein the local window is substantially shorter in time than the global window; and measuring a distance between the global and local characteristic to determine occurrences of the unusual short time events.