Understanding Vehicular Traffic Behavior from Video: A Survey of Unsupervised Approaches

Recent emerging trends for automatic behavior analysis and understanding from infrastructure video are reviewed. Research has shifted from high-resolution estimation of vehicle state and instead, pushed machine learning approaches to extract meaningful patterns in aggregates in an unsupervised fashion. These patterns represent priors on observable motion, which can be utilized to describe a scene, answer behavior questions such as where is a vehicle going, how many vehicles are performing the same action, and to detect an abnormal event. The review focuses on two main methods for scene description, trajectory clustering and topic modeling. Example applications that utilize the behavioral modeling techniques are also presented. In addition, the most popular public datasets for behavioral analysis are presented. Discussion and comment on future directions in the field are also provide

Real-time Anomaly Detection and Localization in Crowded Scenes

In this paper, we propose a method for real-time anomaly detection and localization in crowded scenes. Each video is defined as a set of non-overlapping cubic patches, and is described using two local and global descriptors. These descriptors capture the video properties from different aspects. By incorporating simple and cost-effective Gaussian classifiers, we can distinguish normal activities and anomalies in videos. The local and global features are based on structure similarity between adjacent patches and the features learned in an unsupervised way, using a sparse autoencoder. Experimental results show that our algorithm is comparable to a state-of-the-art procedure on UCSD ped2 and UMN benchmarks, but even more time-efficient. The experiments confirm that our system can reliably detect and localize anomalies as soon as they happen in a video

No Pattern, No Recognition: a Survey about Reproducibility and Distortion Issues of Text Clustering and Topic Modeling

Extracting knowledge from unlabeled texts using machine learning algorithms can be complex. Document categorization and information retrieval are two applications that may benefit from unsupervised learning (e.g., text clustering and topic modeling), including exploratory data analysis. However, the unsupervised learning paradigm poses reproducibility issues. The initialization can lead to variability depending on the machine learning algorithm. Furthermore, the distortions can be misleading when regarding cluster geometry. Amongst the causes, the presence of outliers and anomalies can be a determining factor. Despite the relevance of initialization and outlier issues for text clustering and topic modeling, the authors did not find an in-depth analysis of them. This survey provides a systematic literature review (2011-2022) of these subareas and proposes a common terminology since similar procedures have different terms. The authors describe research opportunities, trends, and open issues. The appendices summarize the theoretical background of the text vectorization, the factorization, and the clustering algorithms that are directly or indirectly related to the reviewed works

Modeling Heterogeneous Statistical Patterns in High-dimensional Data by Adversarial Distributions: An Unsupervised Generative Framework

Since the label collecting is prohibitive and time-consuming, unsupervised methods are preferred in applications such as fraud detection. Meanwhile, such applications usually require modeling the intrinsic clusters in high-dimensional data, which usually displays heterogeneous statistical patterns as the patterns of different clusters may appear in different dimensions. Existing methods propose to model the data clusters on selected dimensions, yet globally omitting any dimension may damage the pattern of certain clusters. To address the above issues, we propose a novel unsupervised generative framework called FIRD, which utilizes adversarial distributions to fit and disentangle the heterogeneous statistical patterns. When applying to discrete spaces, FIRD effectively distinguishes the synchronized fraudsters from normal users. Besides, FIRD also provides superior performance on anomaly detection datasets compared with SOTA anomaly detection methods (over 5% average AUC improvement). The significant experiment results on various datasets verify that the proposed method can better model the heterogeneous statistical patterns in high-dimensional data and benefit downstream applications