EvAn: Neuromorphic Event-based Anomaly Detection

Event-based cameras are bio-inspired novel sensors that asynchronously record changes in illumination in the form of events, thus resulting in significant advantages over conventional cameras in terms of low power utilization, high dynamic range, and no motion blur. Moreover, such cameras, by design, encode only the relative motion between the scene and the sensor (and not the static background) to yield a very sparse data structure, which can be utilized for various motion analytics tasks. In this paper, for the first time in event data analytics community, we leverage these advantages of an event camera towards a critical vision application - video anomaly detection. We propose to model the motion dynamics in the event domain with dual discriminator conditional Generative adversarial Network (cGAN) built on state-of-the-art architectures. To adapt event data for using as input to cGAN, we also put forward a deep learning solution to learn a novel representation of event data, which retains the sparsity of the data as well as encode the temporal information readily available from these sensors. Since there is no existing dataset for anomaly detection in event domain, we also provide an anomaly detection event dataset with an exhaustive set of anomalies. We empirically validate different components of our architecture on this proposed dataset as well as validate the benefits of our event data representation over state-of-the-art event data representations on video anomaly detection application.