Event and Activity Recognition in Video Surveillance for Cyber-Physical Systems

This chapter aims to aid the development of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) in automated understanding of events and activities in various applications of video-surveillance. These events are mostly captured by drones, CCTVs or novice and unskilled individuals on low-end devices. Being unconstrained, these videos are immensely challenging due to a number of quality factors. We present an extensive account of the various approaches taken to solve the problem over the years. This ranges from methods as early as Structure from Motion (SFM) based approaches to recent solution frameworks involving deep neural networks. We show that the long-term motion patterns alone play a pivotal role in the task of recognizing an event. Consequently each video is significantly represented by a fixed number of key-frames using a graph-based approach. Only the temporal features are exploited using a hybrid Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) + Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) architecture. The results we obtain are encouraging as they outperform standard temporal CNNs and are at par with those using spatial information along with motion cues. Further exploring multistream models, we conceive a multi-tier fusion strategy for the spatial and temporal wings of a network. A consolidated representation of the respective individual prediction vectors on video and frame levels is obtained using a biased conflation technique. The fusion strategy endows us with greater rise in precision on each stage as compared to the state-of-the-art methods, and thus a powerful consensus is achieved in classification. Results are recorded on four benchmark datasets widely used in the domain of action recognition, namely CCV, HMDB, UCF-101 and KCV. It is inferable that focusing on better classification of the video sequences certainly leads to robust actuation of a system designed for event surveillance and object cum activity tracking.