Energy-based localized anomaly detection in video surveillance

Automated detection of abnormal events in video surveillance is an important task in research and practical applications. This is, however, a challenging problem due to the growing collection of data without the knowledge of what to be defined as “abnormal”, and the expensive feature engineering procedure. In this paper we introduce a unified framework for anomaly detection in video based on the restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM), a recent powerful method for unsupervised learning and representation learning. Our proposed system works directly on the image pixels rather than hand-crafted features, it learns new representations for data in a completely unsupervised manner without the need for labels, and then reconstructs the data to recognize the locations of abnormal events based on the reconstruction errors. More importantly, our approach can be deployed in both offline and streaming settings, in which trained parameters of the model are fixed in offline setting whilst are updated incrementally with video data arriving in a stream. Experiments on three publicly benchmark video datasets show that our proposed method can detect and localize the abnormalities at pixel level with better accuracy than those of baselines, and achieve competitive performance compared with state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, as RBM belongs to a wider class of deep generative models, our framework lays the groundwork towards a more powerful deep unsupervised abnormality detection framework.