Fast fight detection

PLoS One. 2015 Apr 10;10(4):e0120448. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0120448. eCollection 2015.

Abstract

Action recognition has become a hot topic within computer vision. However, the action recognition community has focused mainly on relatively simple actions like clapping, walking, jogging, etc. The detection of specific events with direct practical use such as fights or in general aggressive behavior has been comparatively less studied. Such capability may be extremely useful in some video surveillance scenarios like prisons, psychiatric centers or even embedded in camera phones. As a consequence, there is growing interest in developing violence detection algorithms. Recent work considered the well-known Bag-of-Words framework for the specific problem of fight detection. Under this framework, spatio-temporal features are extracted from the video sequences and used for classification. Despite encouraging results in which high accuracy rates were achieved, the computational cost of extracting such features is prohibitive for practical applications. This work proposes a novel method to detect violence sequences. Features extracted from motion blobs are used to discriminate fight and non-fight sequences. Although the method is outperformed in accuracy by state of the art, it has a significantly faster computation time thus making it amenable for real-time applications.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Area Under Curve
  • Humans
  • Movement / physiology*
  • Pattern Recognition, Automated
  • ROC Curve
  • Video Recording

Grants and funding

This work has been partially supported by Project TIN2011-24367 from Spain’s Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. Also it has been partially supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 643924. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.