Detecting Anomalous Trajectories via Recurrent Neural Networks

Detecting anomalies from trajectory data is an important task in video surveillance. However, it is difficult to give a precise definition of this term since trajectory data obtained from different camera views may vary in shape, direction, and spatial distribution. In this paper, we propose trajectory distance metrics based on a recurrent neural network to measure similarities and detect anomalies from trajectory data. First, we use an autoencoder to capture the dynamic features of a trajectory. The distance between two trajectories is defined by the reconstruction errors based on the learned models. We then detect anomalies based on the nearest neighbors using the proposed metric. As such, we can deal with various kinds of anomalies in different scenes and detect anomalous trajectories in either a supervised or unsupervised manner. Experiments show that the proposed algorithm performs favorably against the state-of-the-art anomaly detections on the benchmark datasets.