Density aware anomaly detection in crowded scenes

Coherent nature of crowd movement allows representing the crowd motion using sparse features. However, surveillance videos recorded at different periods of time are likely to have different crowd densities and motion characteristics. These varying scene properties necessitate use of different models for an effective representation of behaviour at different periods. In this study, a density aware approach is proposed to detect motion‐based anomalies for scenes having varying crowd densities. In the training, the sparse features are modelled using separate hidden Markov models, each of which becomes an expert for specific scene characteristics. These models are then used for anomaly detection. The proposed method automatically adapts to the changing scene dynamics by switching to the most representative model at each frame. The authors demonstrate the effectiveness and real‐time performance of the proposed method on real‐life datasets as well as on simulated crowd videos that they generated and made publicly available to download.