Relative Attributes for Large-Scale Abandoned Object Detection

Effective reduction of false alarms in large-scale video surveillance is rather challenging, especially for applications where abnormal events of interest rarely occur, such as abandoned object detection. We develop an approach to prioritize alerts by ranking them, and demonstrate its great effectiveness in reducing false positives while keeping good detection accuracy. Our approach benefits from a novel representation of abandoned object alerts by relative attributes, namely static ness, foreground ness and abandonment. The relative strengths of these attributes are quantified using a ranking function[19] learnt on suitably designed low-level spatial and temporal features. These attributes of varying strengths are not only powerful in distinguishing abandoned objects from false alarms such as people and light artifacts, but also computationally efficient for large-scale deployment. With these features, we apply a linear ranking algorithm to sort alerts according to their relevance to the end-user. We test the effectiveness of our approach on both public data sets and large ones collected from the real world.