The crime rates today can inevitably put a civilian's life in danger. While consistent efforts are being made to alleviate crime, there is also a dire need to create a smart and proactive surveillance system. Our project implements a smart surveillance system that would alert the authorities in real-time when a crime is being committed. During armed robberies and hostage situations, most often, the police cannot reach the place on time to prevent it from happening, owing to the lag in communication between the informants of the crime scene and the police. We propose an object detection model that implements deep learning algorithms to detect objects of violence such as pistols, knives, rifles from video surveillance footage, and in turn send real-time alerts to the authorities. There are a number of object detection algorithms being developed, each being evaluated under the performance metric mAP. On implementing Faster R-CNN with ResNet 101 architecture we found the mAP score to be about 91%. However, the downside to this is the excessive training and inferencing time it incurs. On the other hand, YOLOv5 architecture resulted in a model that performed very well in terms of speed. Its training speed was found to be 0.012 s / image during training but naturally, the accuracy was not as high as Faster R-CNN. With good computer architecture, it can run at about 40 fps. Thus, there is a tradeoff between speed and accuracy and it's important to strike a balance. We use transfer learning to improve accuracy by training the model on our custom dataset. This project can be deployed on any generic CCTV camera by setting up a live RTSP (real-time streaming protocol) and streaming the footage on a laptop or desktop where the deep learning model is being run.
Computer vision based obstacle detection and target tracking for autonomous vehicles
