Efficient Vision Language Model Fine-tuning for Text-based Person Anomaly Search

This paper presents the HFUT-LMC team's solution to the WWW 2025 challenge on Text-based Person Anomaly Search (TPAS). The primary objective of this challenge is to accurately identify pedestrians exhibiting either normal or abnormal behavior within a large library of pedestrian images. Unlike traditional video analysis tasks, TPAS significantly emphasizes understanding and interpreting the subtle relationships between text descriptions and visual data. The complexity of this task lies in the model's need to not only match individuals to text descriptions in massive image datasets but also accurately differentiate between search results when faced with similar descriptions. To overcome these challenges, we introduce the Similarity Coverage Analysis (SCA) strategy to address the recognition difficulty caused by similar text descriptions. This strategy effectively enhances the model's capacity to manage subtle differences, thus improving both the accuracy and reliability of the search. Our proposed solution demonstrated excellent performance in this challenge.

2D bidirectional gated recurrent unit convolutional Neural networks for end-to-end violence detection In videos

Abnormal behavior detection, action recognition, fight and violence detection in videos is an area that has attracted a lot of interest in recent years. In this work, we propose an architecture that combines a Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit (BiGRU) and a 2D Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to detect violence in video sequences. A CNN is used to extract spatial characteristics from each frame, while the BiGRU extracts temporal and local motion characteristics using CNN extracted features from multiple frames. The proposed end-to-end deep learning network is tested in three public datasets with varying scene complexities. The proposed network achieves accuracies up to 98%. The obtained results are promising and show the performance of the proposed end-to-end approach.

A Critical Analysis on Machine Learning Techniques for Video-based Human Activity Recognition of Surveillance Systems: A Review

Upsurging abnormal activities in crowded locations such as airports, train stations, bus stops, shopping malls, etc., urges the necessity for an intelligent surveillance system. An intelligent surveillance system can differentiate between normal and suspicious activities from real-time video analysis that will enable to take appropriate measures regarding the level of an anomaly instantaneously and efficiently. Video-based human activity recognition has intrigued many researchers with its pressing issues and a variety of applications ranging from simple hand gesture recognition to crucial behavior recognition in a surveillance system. This paper provides a critical survey of video-based Human Activity Recognition (HAR) techniques beginning with an examination of basic approaches for detecting and recognizing suspicious behavior followed by a critical analysis of machine learning and deep learning techniques such as Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), Hidden Markov Model (HMM), K-means Clustering etc. A detailed investigation and comparison are done on these learning techniques on the basis of feature extraction techniques, parameter initialization, and optimization algorithms, accuracy, etc. The purpose of this review is to prioritize positive schemes and to assist researchers with emerging advancements in this field's future endeavors. This paper also pragmatically discusses existing challenges in the field of HAR and examines the prospects in the field.

SMART: Scene-motion-aware human action recognition framework for mental disorder group

Patients with mental disorders often exhibit risky abnormal actions, such as climbing walls or hitting windows, necessitating intelligent video behavior monitoring for smart healthcare with the rising Internet of Things (IoT) technology. However, the development of vision-based Human Action Recognition (HAR) for these actions is hindered by the lack of specialized algorithms and datasets. In this paper, we innovatively propose to build a vision-based HAR dataset including abnormal actions often occurring in the mental disorder group and then introduce a novel Scene-Motion-aware Action Recognition Technology framework, named SMART, consisting of two technical modules. First, we propose a scene perception module to extract human motion trajectory and human-scene interaction features, which introduces additional scene information for a supplementary semantic representation of the above actions. Second, the multi-stage fusion module fuses the skeleton motion, motion trajectory, and human-scene interaction features, enhancing the semantic association between the skeleton motion and the above supplementary representation, thus generating a comprehensive representation with both human motion and scene information. The effectiveness of our proposed method has been validated on our self-collected HAR dataset (MentalHAD), achieving 94.9% and 93.1% accuracy in un-seen subjects and scenes and outperforming state-of-the-art approaches by 6.5% and 13.2%, respectively. The demonstrated subject- and scene- generalizability makes it possible for SMART's migration to practical deployment in smart healthcare systems for mental disorder patients in medical settings. The code and dataset will be released publicly for further research: https://github.com/Inowlzy/SMART.git.

Uncovering the Unseen: Discover Hidden Intentions by Micro-Behavior Graph Reasoning

This paper introduces a new and challenging Hidden Intention Discovery (HID) task. Unlike existing intention recognition tasks, which are based on obvious visual representations to identify common intentions for normal behavior, HID focuses on discovering hidden intentions when humans try to hide their intentions for abnormal behavior. HID presents a unique challenge in that hidden intentions lack the obvious visual representations to distinguish them from normal intentions. Fortunately, from a sociological and psychological perspective, we find that the difference between hidden and normal intentions can be reasoned from multiple micro-behaviors, such as gaze, attention, and facial expressions. Therefore, we first discover the relationship between micro-behavior and hidden intentions and use graph structure to reason about hidden intentions. To facilitate research in the field of HID, we also constructed a seminal dataset containing a hidden intention annotation of a typical theft scenario for HID. Extensive experiments show that the proposed network improves performance on the HID task by 9.9\% over the state-of-the-art method SBP.

Prompt-Guided Zero-Shot Anomaly Action Recognition using Pretrained Deep Skeleton Features

This study investigates unsupervised anomaly action recognition, which identifies video-level abnormal-human-behavior events in an unsupervised manner without abnormal samples, and simultaneously addresses three limitations in the conventional skeleton-based approaches: target domain-dependent DNN training, robustness against skeleton errors, and a lack of normal samples. We present a unified, user prompt-guided zero-shot learning framework using a target domain-independent skeleton feature extractor, which is pretrained on a large-scale action recognition dataset. Particularly, during the training phase using normal samples, the method models the distribution of skeleton features of the normal actions while freezing the weights of the DNNs and estimates the anomaly score using this distribution in the inference phase. Additionally, to increase robustness against skeleton errors, we introduce a DNN architecture inspired by a point cloud deep learning paradigm, which sparsely propagates the features between joints. Furthermore, to prevent the unobserved normal actions from being misidentified as abnormal actions, we incorporate a similarity score between the user prompt embeddings and skeleton features aligned in the common space into the anomaly score, which indirectly supplements normal actions. On two publicly available datasets, we conduct experiments to test the effectiveness of the proposed method with respect to abovementioned limitations.

Hybrid Classifiers for Spatio-temporal Real-time Abnormal Behaviors Detection, Tracking, and Recognition in Massive Hajj Crowds

Individual abnormal behaviors vary depending on crowd sizes, contexts, and scenes. Challenges such as partial occlusions, blurring, large-number abnormal behavior, and camera viewing occur in large-scale crowds when detecting, tracking, and recognizing individuals with abnormal behaviors. In this paper, our contribution is twofold. First, we introduce an annotated and labeled large-scale crowd abnormal behaviors Hajj dataset (HAJJv2). Second, we propose two methods of hybrid Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Random Forests (RFs) to detect and recognize Spatio-temporal abnormal behaviors in small and large-scales crowd videos. In small-scale crowd videos, a ResNet-50 pre-trained CNN model is fine-tuned to verify whether every frame is normal or abnormal in the spatial domain. If anomalous behaviors are observed, a motion-based individuals detection method based on the magnitudes and orientations of Horn-Schunck optical flow is used to locate and track individuals with abnormal behaviors. A Kalman filter is employed in large-scale crowd videos to predict and track the detected individuals in the subsequent frames. Then, means, variances, and standard deviations statistical features are computed and fed to the RF to classify individuals with abnormal behaviors in the temporal domain. In large-scale crowds, we fine-tune the ResNet-50 model using YOLOv2 object detection technique to detect individuals with abnormal behaviors in the spatial domain.

Defending against Adversarial Audio via Diffusion Model

Deep learning models have been widely used in commercial acoustic systems in recent years. However, adversarial audio examples can cause abnormal behaviors for those acoustic systems, while being hard for humans to perceive. Various methods, such as transformation-based defenses and adversarial training, have been proposed to protect acoustic systems from adversarial attacks, but they are less effective against adaptive attacks. Furthermore, directly applying the methods from the image domain can lead to suboptimal results because of the unique properties of audio data. In this paper, we propose an adversarial purification-based defense pipeline, AudioPure, for acoustic systems via off-the-shelf diffusion models. Taking advantage of the strong generation ability of diffusion models, AudioPure first adds a small amount of noise to the adversarial audio and then runs the reverse sampling step to purify the noisy audio and recover clean audio. AudioPure is a plug-and-play method that can be directly applied to any pretrained classifier without any fine-tuning or re-training. We conduct extensive experiments on speech command recognition task to evaluate the robustness of AudioPure. Our method is effective against diverse adversarial attacks (e.g. $\mathcal{L}_2$ or $\mathcal{L}_\infty$-norm). It outperforms the existing methods under both strong adaptive white-box and black-box attacks bounded by $\mathcal{L}_2$ or $\mathcal{L}_\infty$-norm (up to +20\% in robust accuracy). Besides, we also evaluate the certified robustness for perturbations bounded by $\mathcal{L}_2$-norm via randomized smoothing. Our pipeline achieves a higher certified accuracy than baselines.

Real-Time Elderly Monitoring for Senior Safety by Lightweight Human Action Recognition

With an increasing number of elders living alone, care-giving from a distance becomes a compelling need, particularly for safety. Real-time monitoring and action recognition are essential to raise an alert timely when abnormal behaviors or unusual activities occur. While wearable sensors are widely recognized as a promising solution, highly depending on user's ability and willingness makes them inefficient. In contrast, video streams collected through non-contact optical cameras provide richer information and release the burden on elders. In this paper, leveraging the Independently-Recurrent neural Network (IndRNN) we propose a novel Real-time Elderly Monitoring for senior Safety (REMS) based on lightweight human action recognition (HAR) technology. Using captured skeleton images, the REMS scheme is able to recognize abnormal behaviors or actions and preserve the user's privacy. To achieve high accuracy, the HAR module is trained and fine-tuned using multiple databases. An extensive experimental study verified that REMS system performs action recognition accurately and timely. REMS meets the design goals as a privacy-preserving elderly safety monitoring system and possesses the potential to be adopted in various smart monitoring systems.

iExam: A Novel Online Exam Monitoring and Analysis System Based on Face Detection and Recognition

Online exams via video conference software like Zoom have been adopted in many schools due to COVID-19. While it is convenient, it is challenging for teachers to supervise online exams from simultaneously displayed student Zoom windows. In this paper, we propose iExam, an intelligent online exam monitoring and analysis system that can not only use face detection to assist invigilators in real-time student identification, but also be able to detect common abnormal behaviors (including face disappearing, rotating faces, and replacing with a different person during the exams) via a face recognition-based post-exam video analysis. To build such a novel system in its first kind, we overcome three challenges. First, we discover a lightweight approach to capturing exam video streams and analyzing them in real time. Second, we utilize the left-corner names that are displayed on each student's Zoom window and propose an improved OCR (optical character recognition) technique to automatically gather the ground truth for the student faces with dynamic positions. Third, we perform several experimental comparisons and optimizations to efficiently shorten the training and testing time required on teachers' PC. Our evaluation shows that iExam achieves high accuracy, 90.4% for real-time face detection and 98.4% for post-exam face recognition, while maintaining acceptable runtime performance. We have made iExam's source code available at https://github.com/VPRLab/iExam.