Detecting Violent Robberies in CCTV Videos Using Deep Learning

Video surveillance through security cameras has become difficult due to the fact that many systems require manual human inspection for identifying violent or suspicious scenarios, which is practically inefficient. Therefore, the contribution of this paper is twofold: the presentation of a video dataset called UNI-Crime, and the proposal of a violent robbery detection method in CCTV videos using a deep-learning sequence model. Each of the 30 frames of our videos passes through a pre-trained VGG-16 feature extractor; then, all the sequence of features is processed by two convolutional long-short term memory (convLSTM) layers; finally, the last hidden state passes through a series of fully-connected layers in order to obtain a single classification result. The method is able to detect a variety of violent robberies (i.e., armed robberies involving firearms or knives, or robberies showing different level of aggressiveness) with an accuracy of 96.69%.