Anomalous Event Detection in Traffic Video Based on Sequential Temporal Patterns of Spatial Interval Events

Abstract

Detection of anomalous events from video streams is a challenging problem in many video surveillance applications. One such application that has received significant attention from the computer vision community is traffic video surveillance. In this paper, a Lossy Count based Sequential Temporal Pattern mining approach (LC-STP) is proposed for detecting spatio-temporal abnormal events (such as a traffic violation at junction) from sequences of video streams. The proposed approach relies mainly on spatial abstractions of each object, mining frequent temporal patterns in a sequence of video frames to form a regular temporal pattern. In order to detect each object in every frame, the input video is first pre-processed by applying Gaussian Mixture Models. After the detection of foreground objects, the tracking is carried out using block motion estimation by the three-step search method. The primitive events of the object are represented by assigning spatial and temporal symbols corresponding to their location and time information. These primitive events are analyzed to form a temporal pattern in a sequence of video frames, representing temporal relation between various object’s primitive events. This is repeated for each window of sequences, and the support for temporal sequence is obtained based on LC-STP to discover regular patterns of normal events. Events deviating from these patterns are identified as anomalies. Unlike the traditional frequent item set mining methods, the proposed method generates maximal frequent patterns without candidate generation. Furthermore, experimental results show that the proposed method performs well and can detect video anomalies in real traffic video data.