Bayesian Nonparametric Approaches to Abnormality Detection in Video Surveillance

In data science, anomaly detection is the process of identifying the items, events or observations which do not conform to expected patterns in a dataset. As widely acknowledged in the computer vision community and security management, discovering suspicious events is the key issue for abnormal detection in video surveillance. The important steps in identifying such events include stream data segmentation and hidden patterns discovery. However, the crucial challenge in stream data segmentation and hidden patterns discovery are the number of coherent segments in surveillance stream and the number of traffic patterns are unknown and hard to specify. Therefore, in this paper we revisit the abnormality detection problem through the lens of Bayesian nonparametric (BNP) and develop a novel usage of BNP methods for this problem. In particular, we employ the Infinite Hidden Markov Model and Bayesian Nonparametric Factor Analysis for stream data segmentation and pattern discovery. In addition, we introduce an interactive system allowing users to inspect and browse suspicious events.