Weakly and Partially Supervised Learning Frameworks for Anomaly Detection

The automatic detection of abnormal events in surveillance footage is still a concern of the research community. Since protection is the primary purpose of installing video surveillance systems, the monitoring capability to keep public safety, and its rapid response to satisfy this purpose, is a significant challenge even for humans. Nowadays, human capacity has not kept pace with the increased use of surveillance systems, requiring much supervision to identify unusual events that could put any person or company at risk, without ignoring the fact that there is a substantial waste of labor and time due to the extremely low likelihood of occurring anomalous events compared to normal ones. Consequently, the need for an automatic detection algorithm of abnormal events has become crucial in video surveillance. Even being in the scope of various research works published in the last decade, the state-of-the-art performance is still unsatisfactory and far below the required for an effective deployment of this kind of technology in fully unconstrained scenarios. Nevertheless, despite all the research done in this area, the automatic detection of abnormal events remains a challenge for many reasons. Starting by environmental diversity, the complexity of movements resemblance in different actions, crowded scenarios, and taking into account all possible standard patterns to define a normal action is undoubtedly difficult or impossible. Despite the difficulty of solving these problems, the substantive problem lies in obtaining sufficient amounts of labeled abnormal samples, which concerning computer vision algorithms, is fundamental. More importantly, obtaining an extensive set of different videos that satisfy the previously mentioned conditions is not a simple task. In addition to its effort and time-consuming, defining the boundary between normal and abnormal actions is usually unclear. Henceforward, in this work, the main objective is to provide several solutions to the problems mentioned above, by focusing on analyzing previous state-of-the-art methods and presenting an extensive overview to clarify the concepts employed on capturing normal and abnormal patterns. Also, by exploring different strategies, we were able to develop new approaches that consistently advance the state-of-the-art performance. Moreover, we announce the availability of a new large-scale first of its kind dataset fully annotated at the frame level, concerning a specific anomaly detection event with a wide diversity in fighting scenarios, that can be freely used by the research community. Along with this document with the purpose of requiring minimal supervision, two different proposals are described; the first method employs the recent technique of self-supervised learning to avoid the laborious task of annotation, where the training set is autonomously labeled using an iterative learning framework composed of two independent experts that feed data to each other through a Bayesian framework. The second proposal explores a new method to learn an anomaly ranking model in the multiple instance learning paradigm by leveraging weakly labeled videos, where the training labels are done at the video-level. The experiments were conducted in several well-known datasets, and our solutions solidly outperform the state-of-the-art. Additionally, as a proof-of-concept system, we also present the results of collected real-world simulations in different environments to perform a field test of our learned models.A detecção automática de eventos anómalos em imagens de videovigilância permanece uma inquietação por parte da comunidade científica. Sendo a proteção o principal propósito da instalação de sistemas de vigilância, a capacidade de monitorização da segurança pública, e a sua rápida resposta para satisfazer essa finalidade, é uma adversidade até para o ser humano. Nos dias de hoje, com o aumento do uso de sistemas de videovigilância, a capacidade humana não tem alcançado a cadência necessária, exigindo uma supervisão exorbitante para a identificação de acontecimentos invulgares que coloquem uma identidade ou sociedade em risco. O facto da probabilidade de se suceder um incidente ser extremamente reduzida comparada a eventualidades normais, existe um gasto substancial de tempo de ofício. Consequentemente, a necessidade para um algorítmo de detecção automática de incidentes tem vindo a ser crucial em videovigilância. Mesmo sendo alvo de vários trabalhos científicos publicados na última década, o desempenho do estado-da-arte continua insatisfatório e abaixo do requisitado para uma implementação eficiente deste tipo de tecnologias em ambientes e cenários totalmente espontâneos e incontinentes. Porém, apesar de toda a investigação realizada nesta área, a automatização de detecção de incidentes é um desafio que perdura por várias razões. Começando pela diversidade ambiental, a complexidade da semalhança entre movimentos de ações distintas, cenários de multidões, e ter em conta todos os padrões para definir uma ação normal, é indiscutivelmente difícil ou impossível. Não obstante a dificuldade de resolução destes problemas, o obstáculo fundamental consiste na obtenção de um número suficiente de instâncias classificadas anormais, considerando algoritmos de visão computacional é essencial. Mais importante ainda, obter um vasto conjunto de diferentes vídeos capazes de satisfazer as condições previamente mencionadas, não é uma tarefa simples. Em adição ao esforço e tempo despendido, estabelecer um limite entre ações normais e anormais é frequentemente indistinto. Tendo estes aspetos em consideração, neste trabalho, o principal objetivo é providenciar diversas soluções para os problemas previamente mencionados, concentrando na análise de métodos do estado-da-arte e apresentando uma visão abrangente dos mesmos para clarificar os conceitos aplicados na captura de padrões normais e anormais. Inclusive, a exploração de diferentes estratégias habilitou-nos a desenvolver novas abordagens que aprimoram consistentemente o desempenho do estado-da-arte. Por último, anunciamos a disponibilidade de um novo conjunto de dados, em grande escala, totalmente anotado ao nível da frame em relação à detecção de anomalias em um evento específico com uma vasta diversidade em cenários de luta, podendo ser livremente utilizado pela comunidade científica. Neste documento, com o propósito de requerer o mínimo de supervisão, são descritas duas propostas diferentes; O primeiro método põe em prática a recente técnica de aprendizagem auto-supervisionada para evitar a árdua tarefa de anotação, onde o conjunto de treino é classificado autonomamente usando uma estrutura de aprendizagem iterativa composta por duas redes neuronais independentes que fornecem dados entre si através de uma estrutura Bayesiana. A segunda proposta explora um novo método para aprender um modelo de classificação de anomalias no paradigma multiple-instance learning manuseando vídeos fracamente anotados, onde a classificação do conjunto de treino é feita ao nível do vídeo. As experiências foram concebidas em vários conjuntos de dados, e as nossas soluções superam consolidamente o estado-da-arte. Adicionalmente, como sistema de prova de conceito, apresentamos os resultados da execução do nosso modelo em simulações reais em diferentes ambientes

Freeway traffic incident detection using large scale traffic data and cameras

Automatic incident detection (AID) is crucial for reducing non-recurrent congestion caused by traffic incidents. In this paper, a data-driven AID framework is proposed that can leverage large-scale historical traffic data along with the inherent topology of the traffic networks to obtain robust traffic patterns. Such traffic patterns can be compared with the real-time traffic data to detect traffic incidents in the road network. Our AID framework consists of two basic steps for traffic pattern estimation. First, we estimate a robust univariate speed threshold using historical traffic information from individual sensors. This step can be parallelized using MapReduce framework thereby making it feasible to implement the framework over large networks. Our study shows that such robust thresholds can improve incident detection performance significantly compared to traditional threshold determination. Second, we leverage the knowledge of the topology of the road network to construct threshold heatmaps and perform image denoising to obtain spatio-temporally denoised thresholds. We used two image denoising techniques, bilateral filtering and total variation for this purpose. Our study shows that overall AID performance can be improved significantly using bilateral filter denoising compared to the noisy thresholds or thresholds obtained using total variation denoising. The second research objective involved detecting traffic congestion from camera images. Two modern deep learning techniques, the traditional deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) and you only look once (YOLO) models, were used to detect traffic congestion from camera images. A shallow model, support vector machine (SVM) was also used for comparison and to determine the improvements that might be obtained using costly GPU techniques. The YOLO model achieved the highest accuracy of 91.2%, followed by the DCNN model with an accuracy of 90.2%; 85% of images were correctly classified by the SVM model. Congestion regions located far away from the camera, single-lane blockages, and glare issues were found to affect the accuracy of the models. Sensitivity analysis showed that all of the algorithms were found to perform well in daytime conditions, but nighttime conditions were found to affect the accuracy of the vision system. However, for all conditions, the areas under the curve (AUCs) were found to be greater than 0.9 for the deep models. This result shows that the models performed well in challenging conditions as well. The third and final part of this study aimed at detecting traffic incidents from CCTV videos. We approached the incident detection problem using trajectory-based approach for non-congested conditions and pixel-based approach for congested conditions. Typically, incident detection from cameras has been approached using either supervised or unsupervised algorithms. A major hindrance in the application of supervised techniques for incident detection is the lack of a sufficient number of incident videos and the labor-intensive, costly annotation tasks involved in the preparation of a labeled dataset. In this study, we approached the incident detection problem using semi-supervised techniques. Maximum likelihood estimation-based contrastive pessimistic likelihood estimation (CPLE) was used for trajectory classification and identification of incident trajectories. Vehicle detection was performed using state-of-the-art deep learning-based YOLOv3, and simple online real-time tracking (SORT) was used for tracking. Results showed that CPLE-based trajectory classification outperformed the traditional semi-supervised techniques (self learning and label spreading) and its supervised counterpart by a significant margin. For pixel-based incident detection, we used a novel Histogram of Optical Flow Magnitude (HOFM) feature descriptor to detect incident vehicles using SVM classifier based on all vehicles detected by YOLOv3 object detector. We show in this study that this approach can handle both congested and non-congested conditions. However, trajectory-based approach works considerably faster (45 fps compared to 1.4 fps) and also achieves better accuracy compared to pixel-based approach for non-congested conditions. Therefore, for optimal resource usage, trajectory-based approach can be used for non-congested traffic conditions while for congested conditions, pixel-based approach can be used

Crowd behaviour and congestion analysis through deep machine learning

This thesis looks to advance understanding in the field of computer vision based crowd analysis through a combination of deep learning techniques, multi-task learning, and domain adaptation. Issues that have limited progress in this field to date include visual occlusion, scale and perspective issues, variation in scene content as well as a lack of labelled training data. Another negative trend that has emerged in this field as well as in computer vision in general is the development of bespoke, single-task techniques that cannot be easily extended or re-used. The core contributions of this work are as follows. First, deep learning methods are developed for several crowd analysis tasks including crowd counting, crowd density level estimation, crowd behaviour recognition and crowd behaviour anomaly detection. The proposed data-driven methods are shown to be superior to techniques which rely on hand-crafted features, overcoming many of the observed challenges and achieving state-of-the-art results. Second, multi-task learning strategies are applied to crowd behaviour and congestion analysis tasks, increasing the overall predictive performance and removing redundant model parameters. Finally, domain adaptation techniques are investigated as a means to extend a given crowd analysis model to perform the same task in new visual domains (e.g. medical, wildlife) and vice-versa, with original domain performance preserved

Deep Learning-Based Human Pose Estimation: A Survey

Human pose estimation aims to locate the human body parts and build human body representation (e.g., body skeleton) from input data such as images and videos. It has drawn increasing attention during the past decade and has been utilized in a wide range of applications including human-computer interaction, motion analysis, augmented reality, and virtual reality. Although the recently developed deep learning-based solutions have achieved high performance in human pose estimation, there still remain challenges due to insufficient training data, depth ambiguities, and occlusion. The goal of this survey paper is to provide a comprehensive review of recent deep learning-based solutions for both 2D and 3D pose estimation via a systematic analysis and comparison of these solutions based on their input data and inference procedures. More than 240 research papers since 2014 are covered in this survey. Furthermore, 2D and 3D human pose estimation datasets and evaluation metrics are included. Quantitative performance comparisons of the reviewed methods on popular datasets are summarized and discussed. Finally, the challenges involved, applications, and future research directions are concluded. We also provide a regularly updated project page: \url{https://github.com/zczcwh/DL-HPE

Applying computer analysis to detect and predict violent crime during night time economy hours

The Night-Time Economy is characterised by increased levels of drunkenness, disorderly behaviour and assault-related injury. The annual cost associated with violent incidents is approximately £14 billion, with the cost of violence with injury costing approximately 6.6 times more than violence without injury. The severity of an injury can be reduced by intervening in the incident as soon as possible. Both understanding where violence occurs and detecting incidents can result in quicker intervention through effective police resource deployment. Current systems of detection use human operators whose detection ability is poor in typical surveillance environments. This is used as motivation for the development of computer vision-based detection systems. Alternatively, a predictive model can estimate where violence is likely to occur to help law enforcement with the tactical deployment of resources. Many studies have simulated pedestrian movement through an environment to inform environmental design to minimise negative outcomes. For the main contributions of this thesis, computer vision analysis and agent-based modelling are utilised to develop methods for the detection and prediction of violent behaviour respectively. Two methods of violent behaviour detection from video data are presented. Treating violence detection as a classification task, each method reports state-of-the-art classification performance and real-time performance. The first method targets crowd violence by encoding crowd motion using temporal summaries of Grey Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) derived features. The second method, aimed at detecting one-on-one violence, operates by locating and subsequently describing regions of interest based on motion characteristics associated with violent behaviour. Justified using existing literature, the characteristics are high acceleration, non-linear movement and convergent motion. Each violence detection method is used to evaluate the intrinsic properties of violent behaviour. We demonstrate issues associated with violent behaviour datasets by showing that state-of-the-art classification is achievable by exploiting data bias, highlighting potential failure points for feature representation learning schemes. Using agent-based modelling techniques and regression analysis, we discovered that including the effects of alcohol when simulating behaviour within city centre environments produces a more accurate model for predicting violent behaviour

Crowd simulation and visualization

Large-scale simulation and visualization are essential topics in areas as different as sociology, physics, urbanism, training, entertainment among others. This kind of systems requires a vast computational power and memory resources commonly available in High Performance Computing HPC platforms. Currently, the most potent clusters have heterogeneous architectures with hundreds of thousands and even millions of cores. The industry trends inferred that exascale clusters would have thousands of millions. The technical challenges for simulation and visualization process in the exascale era are intertwined with difficulties in other areas of research, including storage, communication, programming models and hardware. For this reason, it is necessary prototyping, testing, and deployment a variety of approaches to address the technical challenges identified and evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of each proposed solution. The focus of this research is interactive large-scale crowd simulation and visualization. To exploit to the maximum the capacity of the current HPC infrastructure and be prepared to take advantage of the next generation. The project develops a new approach to scale crowd simulation and visualization on heterogeneous computing cluster using a task-based technique. Its main characteristic is hardware agnostic. It abstracts the difficulties that imply the use of heterogeneous architectures like memory management, scheduling, communications, and synchronization — facilitating development, maintenance, and scalability. With the goal of flexibility and take advantage of computing resources as best as possible, the project explores different configurations to connect the simulation with the visualization engine. This kind of system has an essential use in emergencies. Therefore, urban scenes were implemented as realistic as possible; in this way, users will be ready to face real events. Path planning for large-scale crowds is a challenge to solve, due to the inherent dynamism in the scenes and vast search space. A new path-finding algorithm was developed. It has a hierarchical approach which offers different advantages: it divides the search space reducing the problem complexity, it can obtain a partial path instead of wait for the complete one, which allows a character to start moving and compute the rest asynchronously. It can reprocess only a part if necessary with different levels of abstraction. A case study is presented for a crowd simulation in urban scenarios. Geolocated data are used, they were produced by mobile devices to predict individual and crowd behavior and detect abnormal situations in the presence of specific events. It was also address the challenge of combining all these individual’s location with a 3D rendering of the urban environment. The data processing and simulation approach are computationally expensive and time-critical, it relies thus on a hybrid Cloud-HPC architecture to produce an efficient solution. Within the project, new models of behavior based on data analytics were developed. It was developed the infrastructure to be able to consult various data sources such as social networks, government agencies or transport companies such as Uber. Every time there is more geolocation data available and better computation resources which allow performing analysis of greater depth, this lays the foundations to improve the simulation models of current crowds. The use of simulations and their visualization allows to observe and organize the crowds in real time. The analysis before, during and after daily mass events can reduce the risks and associated logistics costs.La simulación y visualización a gran escala son temas esenciales en áreas tan diferentes como la sociología, la física, el urbanismo, la capacitación, el entretenimiento, entre otros. Este tipo de sistemas requiere una gran capacidad de cómputo y recursos de memoria comúnmente disponibles en las plataformas de computo de alto rendimiento. Actualmente, los equipos más potentes tienen arquitecturas heterogéneas con cientos de miles e incluso millones de núcleos. Las tendencias de la industria infieren que los equipos en la era exascale tendran miles de millones. Los desafíos técnicos en el proceso de simulación y visualización en la era exascale se entrelazan con dificultades en otras áreas de investigación, incluidos almacenamiento, comunicación, modelos de programación y hardware. Por esta razón, es necesario crear prototipos, probar y desplegar una variedad de enfoques para abordar los desafíos técnicos identificados y evaluar las ventajas y desventajas de cada solución propuesta. El foco de esta investigación es la visualización y simulación interactiva de multitudes a gran escala. Aprovechar al máximo la capacidad de la infraestructura actual y estar preparado para aprovechar la próxima generación. El proyecto desarrolla un nuevo enfoque para escalar la simulación y visualización de multitudes en un clúster de computo heterogéneo utilizando una técnica basada en tareas. Su principal característica es que es hardware agnóstico. Abstrae las dificultades que implican el uso de arquitecturas heterogéneas como la administración de memoria, las comunicaciones y la sincronización, lo que facilita el desarrollo, el mantenimiento y la escalabilidad. Con el objetivo de flexibilizar y aprovechar los recursos informáticos lo mejor posible, el proyecto explora diferentes configuraciones para conectar la simulación con el motor de visualización. Este tipo de sistemas tienen un uso esencial en emergencias. Por lo tanto, se implementaron escenas urbanas lo más realistas posible, de esta manera los usuarios estarán listos para enfrentar eventos reales. La planificación de caminos para multitudes a gran escala es un desafío a resolver, debido al dinamismo inherente en las escenas y el vasto espacio de búsqueda. Se desarrolló un nuevo algoritmo de búsqueda de caminos. Tiene un enfoque jerárquico que ofrece diferentes ventajas: divide el espacio de búsqueda reduciendo la complejidad del problema, puede obtener una ruta parcial en lugar de esperar a la completa, lo que permite que un personaje comience a moverse y calcule el resto de forma asíncrona, puede reprocesar solo una parte si es necesario con diferentes niveles de abstracción. Se presenta un caso de estudio para una simulación de multitud en escenarios urbanos. Se utilizan datos geolocalizados producidos por dispositivos móviles para predecir el comportamiento individual y público y detectar situaciones anormales en presencia de eventos específicos. También se aborda el desafío de combinar la ubicación de todos estos individuos con una representación 3D del entorno urbano. Dentro del proyecto, se desarrollaron nuevos modelos de comportamiento basados ¿¿en el análisis de datos. Se creo la infraestructura para poder consultar varias fuentes de datos como redes sociales, agencias gubernamentales o empresas de transporte como Uber. Cada vez hay más datos de geolocalización disponibles y mejores recursos de cómputo que permiten realizar un análisis de mayor profundidad, esto sienta las bases para mejorar los modelos de simulación de las multitudes actuales. El uso de simulaciones y su visualización permite observar y organizar las multitudes en tiempo real. El análisis antes, durante y después de eventos multitudinarios diarios puede reducir los riesgos y los costos logísticos asociadosPostprint (published version

Change blindness: eradication of gestalt strategies

Arrays of eight, texture-defined rectangles were used as stimuli in a one-shot change blindness (CB) task where there was a 50% chance that one rectangle would change orientation between two successive presentations separated by an interval. CB was eliminated by cueing the target rectangle in the first stimulus, reduced by cueing in the interval and unaffected by cueing in the second presentation. This supports the idea that a representation was formed that persisted through the interval before being 'overwritten' by the second presentation (Landman et al, 2003 Vision Research 43149–164]. Another possibility is that participants used some kind of grouping or Gestalt strategy. To test this we changed the spatial position of the rectangles in the second presentation by shifting them along imaginary spokes (by ±1 degree) emanating from the central fixation point. There was no significant difference seen in performance between this and the standard task [F(1,4)=2.565, p=0.185]. This may suggest two things: (i) Gestalt grouping is not used as a strategy in these tasks, and (ii) it gives further weight to the argument that objects may be stored and retrieved from a pre-attentional store during this task