Two-stage Unsupervised Video Anomaly Detection using Low-rank based Unsupervised One-class Learning with Ridge Regression

Abstract

Video anomaly detection is a valuable but challenging task, especially in the field of surveillance videos for public safety. Almost all existing methods tackle the problem under the supervised setting and only a few attempts are conducted on the unsupervised learning. To avoid the cost of labeling training videos, this paper proposes to discriminate anomaly by a novel two-stage framework in a fully unsupervised manner. Unlike previous unsupervised approaches using local change detection to discover abnormality, our method enjoys the global information from video context by considering the pair-wise similarity of all video events. In this way, our method formulates video anomaly detection as an extension of unsupervised one-class learning, which has not been explored in the literature of video anomaly detection. Specifically, our method consists of two stages: The first stage of our kernel-based method, named Low-rank based Unsupervised One-class Learning with Ridge Regression (LR-UOCL-RR), reformulates the optimization goal of UOCL with ridge regression to avoid expensive computation, which enables our method to handle massive unlabeled data from videos. In the second stage, the estimated normal video events from the first stage are fed into the one-class support vector machine to refine the profile around normal events and enhance the performance. The experimental results conducted on two challenging video benchmarks indicate that our method is considerably superior, up to 15:7% AUC gain, to the state-of-the-art methods in the unsupervised anomaly detection task and even better than several supervised approaches.