Autoencoder‐based abnormal activity detection using parallelepiped spatio‐temporal region

The spread of surveillance cameras has necessitated the monitoring of large quantities of surveillance video feeds. A manual monitoring system is near impossible due to the large man‐hour requirements. Recently, automatic abnormal activity detection has been an area of interest among researchers. A spatio‐temporal feature, histogram of optical flow orientation and magnitude (HOFM), has produced impressive ability in detecting abnormal activities. The authors propose a novel non‐uniform spatio‐temporal region resembling parallelepipeds, from which they extract the HOFM features. Autoencoders can be configured to detect abnormal patterns. The authors have used these abilities of the autoencoders to detect abnormalities in the HOFM features extracted from their novel spatio‐temporal regions of the video feeds. The autoencoders are trained on the HOFM features of the videos containing no abnormalities. The autoencoders are then fed with the HOFM features of the videos to be tested for abnormal activities, and these are detected based on the abilities of the autoencoders to reconstruct these features. The proposed method is tested on the standard abnormality detection datasets: UCSD Ped1, UCSD Ped2, Subway Entrance, Subway Exit, and UMN