Violence Detection Using Spatiotemporal Features with 3D Convolutional Neural Network

TLDR

Surveillance cameras in smart cities generate vast data, necessitating automated systems to detect violent or abnormal activities and prevent casualties and societal damage. The study proposes a triple‑staged end‑to‑end deep‑learning framework for violence detection. The framework first detects persons with a lightweight CNN, then feeds 16‑frame sequences into a 3D CNN that extracts spatiotemporal features for a Softmax classifier, and the model is optimized with Intel’s toolkit for efficient deployment and alerting to security authorities. The proposed method outperforms existing state‑of‑the‑art methods on benchmark datasets.

Abstract

The worldwide utilization of surveillance cameras in smart cities has enabled researchers to analyze a gigantic volume of data to ensure automatic monitoring. An enhanced security system in smart cities, schools, hospitals, and other surveillance domains is mandatory for the detection of violent or abnormal activities to avoid any casualties which could cause social, economic, and ecological damages. Automatic detection of violence for quick actions is very significant and can efficiently assist the concerned departments. In this paper, we propose a triple-staged end-to-end deep learning violence detection framework. First, persons are detected in the surveillance video stream using a light-weight convolutional neural network (CNN) model to reduce and overcome the voluminous processing of useless frames. Second, a sequence of 16 frames with detected persons is passed to 3D CNN, where the spatiotemporal features of these sequences are extracted and fed to the Softmax classifier. Furthermore, we optimized the 3D CNN model using an open visual inference and neural networks optimization toolkit developed by Intel, which converts the trained model into intermediate representation and adjusts it for optimal execution at the end platform for the final prediction of violent activity. After detection of a violent activity, an alert is transmitted to the nearest police station or security department to take prompt preventive actions. We found that our proposed method outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods for different benchmark datasets.