BMAN: Bidirectional Multi-Scale Aggregation Networks for Abnormal Event Detection

Abnormal event detection is an important task in video surveillance systems. In this paper, we propose novel bidirectional multi-scale aggregation networks (BMAN) for abnormal event detection. The proposed BMAN learns spatio-temporal patterns of normal events to detect deviations from the learned normal patterns as abnormalities. The BMAN consists of two main parts: an inter-frame predictor and an appearance-motion joint detector. The inter-frame predictor is devised to encode normal patterns, which generates an inter-frame using bidirectional multi-scale aggregation based on attention. With the feature aggregation, robustness for object scale variations and complex motions is achieved in normal pattern encoding. Based on the encoded normal patterns, abnormal events are detected by the appearance-motion joint detector in which both appearance and motion characteristics of scenes are considered. Comprehensive experiments are performed, and the results show that the proposed method outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods. The resulting abnormal event detection is interpretable on the visual basis of where the detected events occur. Further, we validate the effectiveness of the proposed network designs by conducting ablation study and feature visualization.