A deep-learning framework running on edge devices for handgun and knife detection from indoor video-surveillance cameras

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The early detection of handguns and knives from surveillance videos is crucial to enhance people’s safety. Despite the increasing development of Deep Learning (DL) methods for general object detection, weapon detection from surveillance videos still presents open challenges. Among these, the most significant are: (i) the very small size of the weapons with respect to the camera field of view and (ii) the need of a real-time feedback, even when using low-cost edge devices for computation. Complex and recently-developed DL architectures could mitigate the former challenge but do not satisfy the latter one. To tackle such limitation, the proposed work addresses the weapon-detection task from an edge perspective. A double-step DL approach was developed and evaluated against other state-of-the-art methods on a custom indoor surveillance dataset. The approach is based on a first Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for people detection which guides a second CNN to identify handguns and knives. To evaluate the performance in a real-world indoor environment, the approach was deployed on a NVIDIA Jetson Nano edge device which was connected to an IP camera. The system achieved near real-time performance without relying on expensive hardware. The results in terms of both COCO Average Precision (AP = 79.30) and Frames per Second (FPS = 5.10) on the low-power NVIDIA Jetson Nano pointed out the goodness of the proposed approach compared with the others, encouraging the spread of automated video surveillance systems affordable to everyone.