Attention-based framework for weakly supervised video anomaly detection

Video anomaly detection automatically recognizes abnormal events in surveillance videos. Existing works have made advances in recognizing whether a video contains abnormal events; however, they cannot temporally localize the abnormal events within videos. This paper presents a novel anomaly attention-based framework for accurately temporally localize the abnormal events. Benefiting from the proposed framework, we can achieve frame-level VAD using video-level labels, which significantly reduces the burden of data annotation. Our method is an end-to-end deep neural network-based approach, which contains three modules: anomaly attention module (AAM), discriminative anomaly attention module (DAAM) and generative anomaly attention module (GAAM). Specifically, AAM is trained to generate the anomaly attention, which is used to measure the abnormal degree of each frame. Whereas, DAAM and GAAM are used to alternately augmenting AAM from two different aspects. On the one hand, DAAM enhancing AAM by optimizing the video-level video classification. On the other hand, GAAM adopts a conditional variational autoencoder to model the likelihood of each frame given the attention for refining AAM. As a result, AAM can generate higher anomaly scores for abnormal frames while lower anomaly scores for normal frames. Experimental results show that our proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods, which validates the superiority of our AAVAD.