Angry Crowds: Detecting Violent Events in Videos

摘要

Approaches inspired by Newtonian mechanics have been successfully applied for detecting abnormal behaviors in crowd scenarios, being the most notable example the Social Force Model (SFM). This class of approaches describes the movements and local interactions among individuals in crowds by means of repulsive and attractive forces. Despite their promising performance, recent socio-psychology studies have shown that current SFM-based methods may not be capable of explaining behaviors in complex crowd scenarios. An alternative approach consists in describing the cognitive processes that gives rise to the behavioral patterns observed in crowd using heuristics. Inspired by these studies, we propose a new hybrid framework to detect violent events in crowd videos. More specifically, (ⅰ) we define a set of simple behavioral heuristics to describe people behaviors in crowd, and (ⅱ) we implement these heuristics into physical equations, being able to model and classify such behaviors in the videos. The resulting heuristic maps are used to extract video features to distinguish violence from normal events. Our violence detection results set the new state of the art on several standard benchmarks and demonstrate the superiority of our method compared to standard motion descriptors, previous physics-inspired models used for crowd analysis and pre-trained ConvNet for crowd behavior analysis.