Novel person detection and suspicious activity recognition using enhanced YOLOv5 and motion feature map

Abstract

Person and suspicious activity detection is a major challenge for image-based surveillance systems. However, the accuracy of person detection is affected by several factors, such as the presence of the person, his trajectory, posture, complex background, and object distortion. In this work, we developed a person-focused dataset that includes various behaviors of students in an educational institution, such as cheating, theft of lab equipment, fights, and threatening situations. This dataset ensures consistent and standardized identification annotations for individuals, making it suitable for detection, tracking, and behavioral analysis of individuals. In addition, we have increased the detection accuracy through an improved architecture called YOLOv5 and introduced an efficient method for detecting global and local anomalous behaviors. This method extracts motion features that accurately describe the person’s movement, speed, and direction. To evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed approach, we validated it against our proposed database and publicly available benchmark datasets. Our method achieves state-of-the-art detection accuracy, namely 96.12%, with an error rate of 6.68% compared to existing methods. The empirical results show a significant improvement in anomalous activity detection. Our paper concludes with a summary and a discussion of possible future research directions.