Anomalous Trajectory Detection in Surveillance Systems Using Pedestrian and Surrounding Information

Abstract

Concurrently detected and annotated abnormal events can have a significant impact on surveillance systems. By considering the specific domain of pedestrian trajectories, this paper presents two main contributions. First, as introduced in much of the work on trajectory-based anomaly detection in the literature, only information about pedestrian paths, such as direction and speed, is considered. Differing from previous work, this paper proposes a framework that deals with additional types of trajectory-based anomalies. These abnormal events take places when a person enters prohibited areas. Those restricted regions are constructed by an online learning algorithm that uses surrounding information, including detected pedestrians and background scenes. Second, a simple data-boosting technique is introduced to overcome a lack of training data; such a problem particularly challenges all previous work, owing to the significantly low frequency of abnormal events. This technique only requires normal trajectories and fundamental information about scenes to increase the amount of training data for both normal and abnormal trajectories. With the increased amount of training data, the conventional abnormal trajectory classifier is able to achieve better prediction accuracy without falling into the over-fitting problem caused by complex learning models. Finally, the proposed framework (which annotates tracks that enter prohibited areas) and a conventional abnormal trajectory detector (using the data-boosting technique) are integrated to form a united detector. Such a detector deals with different types of anomalous trajectories in a hierarchical order. The experimental results show that all proposed detectors can effectively detect anomalous trajectories in the test phase.