MULTICAST: MULTI Confirmation-level Alarm SysTem based on CNN and LSTM to mitigate false alarms for handgun detection in video-surveillance

Despite the constant advances in computer vision, integrating modern single-image detectors in real-time handgun alarm systems in video-surveillance is still debatable. Using such detectors still implies a high number of false alarms and false negatives. In this context, most existent studies select one of the latest single-image detectors and train it on a better dataset or use some pre-processing, post-processing or data-fusion approach to further reduce false alarms. However, none of these works tried to exploit the temporal information present in the videos to mitigate false detections. This paper presents a new system, called MULTI Confirmation-level Alarm SysTem based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Long Short Term Memory networks (LSTM) (MULTICAST), that leverages not only the spacial information but also the temporal information existent in the videos for a more reliable handgun detection. MULTICAST consists of three stages, i) a handgun detection stage, ii) a CNN-based spacial confirmation stage and iii) LSTM-based temporal confirmation stage. The temporal confirmation stage uses the positions of the detected handgun in previous instants to predict its trajectory in the next frame. Our experiments show that MULTICAST reduces by 80% the number of false alarms with respect to Faster R-CNN based-single-image detector, which makes it more useful in providing more effective and rapid security responses.

Automatic Handgun Detection Alarm in Videos Using Deep Learning

Current surveillance and control systems still require human supervision and intervention. This work presents a novel automatic handgun detection system in videos appropriate for both, surveillance and control purposes. We reformulate this detection problem into the problem of minimizing false positives and solve it by building the key training data-set guided by the results of a deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) classifier, then assessing the best classification model under two approaches, the sliding window approach and region proposal approach. The most promising results are obtained by Faster R-CNN based model trained on our new database. The best detector show a high potential even in low quality youtube videos and provides satisfactory results as automatic alarm system. Among 30 scenes, it successfully activates the alarm after five successive true positives in less than 0.2 seconds, in 27 scenes. We also define a new metric, Alarm Activation per Interval (AApI), to assess the performance of a detection model as an automatic detection system in videos.