A Sensor Network Approach for Violence Detection in Smart Cities Using Deep Learning

Citizen safety in modern urban environments is an important aspect of life quality. Implementation of a smart city approach to video surveillance depends heavily on the capability of gathering and processing huge amounts of live urban data. Analyzing data from high bandwidth surveillance video streams provided by large size distributed sensor networks is particularly challenging. We propose here an efficient method for automatic violent behavior detection designed for video sensor networks. Known solutions to real-time violence detection are not suitable for implementation in a resource-constrained environment due to the high processing power requirements. Our algorithm achieves real-time processing on a Raspberry PI-embedded architecture. To ensure separation of temporal and spatial information processing we employ a computationally effective cascaded approach. It consists of a deep neural network followed by a time domain classifier. In contrast with current approaches, the deep neural network input is fed exclusively with motion vector features extracted directly from the MPEG encoded video stream. As proven by results, we achieve state-of-the-art performance, while running on a low computational resources embedded architecture.