Adversarially Learned Abnormal Trajectory Classifier

We address the problem of abnormal event detection from trajectory data. In this paper, a new adversarial approach is proposed for building a deep neural network binary classifier, trained in an unsupervised fashion, that can distinguish normal from abnormal trajectory-based events without the need for setting manual detection threshold. Inspired by the generative adversarial network (GAN) framework, our GAN version is a discriminative one in which the discriminator is trained to distinguish normal and abnormal trajectory reconstruction errors given by a deep autoencoder. With urban traffic videos and their associated trajectories, our proposed method gives the best accuracy for abnormal trajectory detection. In addition, our model can easily be generalized for abnormal trajectory-based event detection and can still yield the best behavioural detection results as demonstrated on the CAVIAR dataset.Comment: Accepted for the 16th Conference on Computer and Robot Vision (CRV) 201

Smart City Development with Urban Transfer Learning

Nowadays, the smart city development levels of different cities are still unbalanced. For a large number of cities which just started development, the governments will face a critical cold-start problem: 'how to develop a new smart city service with limited data?'. To address this problem, transfer learning can be leveraged to accelerate the smart city development, which we term the urban transfer learning paradigm. This article investigates the common process of urban transfer learning, aiming to provide city planners and relevant practitioners with guidelines on how to apply this novel learning paradigm. Our guidelines include common transfer strategies to take, general steps to follow, and case studies in public safety, transportation management, etc. We also summarize a few research opportunities and expect this article can attract more researchers to study urban transfer learning

Urban Anomaly Analytics: Description, Detection, and Prediction

Urban anomalies may result in loss of life or property if not handled properly. Automatically alerting anomalies in their early stage or even predicting anomalies before happening is of great value for populations. Recently, data-driven urban anomaly analysis frameworks have been forming, which utilize urban big data and machine learning algorithms to detect and predict urban anomalies automatically. In this survey, we make a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art research on urban anomaly analytics. We first give an overview of four main types of urban anomalies, traffic anomaly, unexpected crowds, environment anomaly, and individual anomaly. Next, we summarize various types of urban datasets obtained from diverse devices, i.e., trajectory, trip records, CDRs, urban sensors, event records, environment data, social media and surveillance cameras. Subsequently, a comprehensive survey of issues on detecting and predicting techniques for urban anomalies is presented. Finally, research challenges and open problems as discussed.Peer reviewe

An Adaptive Human Activity-Aided Hand-Held Smartphone-Based Pedestrian Dead Reckoning Positioning System

Pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR), enabled by smartphones’ embedded inertial sensors, is widely applied as a type of indoor positioning system (IPS). However, traditional PDR faces two challenges to improve its accuracy: lack of robustness for different PDR-related human activities and positioning error accumulation over elapsed time. To cope with these issues, we propose a novel adaptive human activity-aided PDR (HAA-PDR) IPS that consists of two main parts, human activity recognition (HAR) and PDR optimization. (1) For HAR, eight different locomotion-related activities are divided into two classes: steady-heading activities (ascending/descending stairs, stationary, normal walking, stationary stepping, and lateral walking) and non-steady-heading activities (door opening and turning). A hierarchical combination of a support vector machine (SVM) and decision tree (DT) is used to recognize steady-heading activities. An autoencoder-based deep neural network (DNN) and a heading range-based method to recognize door opening and turning, respectively. The overall HAR accuracy is over 98.44%. (2) For optimization methods, a process automatically sets the parameters of the PDR differently for different activities to enhance step counting and step length estimation. Furthermore, a method of trajectory optimization mitigates PDR error accumulation utilizing the non-steady-heading activities. We divided the trajectory into small segments and reconstructed it after targeted optimization of each segment. Our method does not use any a priori knowledge of the building layout, plan, or map. Finally, the mean positioning error of our HAA-PDR in a multilevel building is 1.79 m, which is a significant improvement in accuracy compared with a baseline state-of-the-art PDR system

Intelligent Deep Fusion Network for Anomaly Identification in Maritime Transportation Systems

This paper introduces a novel deep learning architecture for identifying outliers in the context of intelligent transportation systems. The use of a convolutional neural network with decomposition is explored to find abnormal behavior in maritime data. The set of maritime data is first decomposed into similar clusters containing homogeneous data, and then a convolutional neural network is used for each data cluster. Different models are trained (one per cluster), and each model is learned from highly correlated data. Finally, the results of the models are merged using a simple but efficient fusion strategy. To verify the performance of the proposed framework, intensive experiments were conducted on marine data. The results show the superiority of the proposed framework compared to the baseline solutions in terms of several accuracy metrics.acceptedVersio

End-to-end anomaly detection in stream data

Nowadays, huge volumes of data are generated with increasing velocity through various systems, applications, and activities. This increases the demand for stream and time series analysis to react to changing conditions in real-time for enhanced efficiency and quality of service delivery as well as upgraded safety and security in private and public sectors. Despite its very rich history, time series anomaly detection is still one of the vital topics in machine learning research and is receiving increasing attention. Identifying hidden patterns and selecting an appropriate model that fits the observed data well and also carries over to unobserved data is not a trivial task. Due to the increasing diversity of data sources and associated stochastic processes, this pivotal data analysis topic is loaded with various challenges like complex latent patterns, concept drift, and overfitting that may mislead the model and cause a high false alarm rate. Handling these challenges leads the advanced anomaly detection methods to develop sophisticated decision logic, which turns them into mysterious and inexplicable black-boxes. Contrary to this trend, end-users expect transparency and verifiability to trust a model and the outcomes it produces. Also, pointing the users to the most anomalous/malicious areas of time series and causal features could save them time, energy, and money. For the mentioned reasons, this thesis is addressing the crucial challenges in an end-to-end pipeline of stream-based anomaly detection through the three essential phases of behavior prediction, inference, and interpretation. The first step is focused on devising a time series model that leads to high average accuracy as well as small error deviation. On this basis, we propose higher-quality anomaly detection and scoring techniques that utilize the related contexts to reclassify the observations and post-pruning the unjustified events. Last but not least, we make the predictive process transparent and verifiable by providing meaningful reasoning behind its generated results based on the understandable concepts by a human. The provided insight can pinpoint the anomalous regions of time series and explain why the current status of a system has been flagged as anomalous. Stream-based anomaly detection research is a principal area of innovation to support our economy, security, and even the safety and health of societies worldwide. We believe our proposed analysis techniques can contribute to building a situational awareness platform and open new perspectives in a variety of domains like cybersecurity, and health