Mining anomalous events against frequent sequences in surveillance videos from commercial environments

In the UK alone there are currently over 4.2 million operational CCTV cameras, that is virtually one camera for every 14th person, and this figure is increasing at a fast rate throughout the world (especially after the tragic events of 9/11 and 7/7) (Norris, McCahill, & Wood, 2004). Security concerns are not the only factor driving the rapid growth of CCTV cameras. Another important reason is the access of hidden knowledge extracted from CCTV footage to be used for effective business decision making, such as store designing, customer services, product marketing, reducing store shrinkage, etc. occurring in observed scenes are one of the most important semantic entities that can be extracted from videos (Anwar & Naftel, 2008). Most of the work presented in the past is based upon finding frequent event patterns or deals with discovering already known abnormal events. In contrast, in this paper we present a framework to discover unknown anomalous events associated with a frequent sequence of events (AEASP); that is to discover events, which are unlikely to follow a frequent sequence of events. This information can be very useful for discovering unknown abnormal events and can provide early actionable intelligence to redeploy resources to specific areas of view (such as PTZ camera or attention of a CCTV user). Discovery of anomalous events against a sequential pattern can also provide business intelligence for store management in the retail sector. The proposed event mining framework is an extension to our previous research work presented in Anwar et al. (2010) and also takes the temporal aspect of anomalous events against frequent sequence of events into consideration, that is to discover anomalous events which are true for a specific time interval only and might not be an anomalous events against frequent sequence of events over a whole time spectrum and vice versa. To confront the memory expensive process of searching all the instances of multiple sequential patterns in each data sequence an efficient dynamic sequential pattern search mechanism is introduced. Different experiments are conducted to evaluate the proposed anomalous events against frequent sequence of events mining algorithm’s accuracy and performance.