Robust Unsupervised Video Anomaly Detection by Multipath Frame Prediction

Video anomaly detection is commonly used in many applications, such as security surveillance, and is very challenging. A majority of recent video anomaly detection approaches utilize deep reconstruction models, but their performance is often suboptimal because of insufficient reconstruction error differences between normal and abnormal video frames in practice. Meanwhile, frame prediction-based anomaly detection methods have shown promising performance. In this article, we propose a novel and robust unsupervised video anomaly detection method by frame prediction with a proper design which is more in line with the characteristics of surveillance videos. The proposed method is equipped with a multipath ConvGRU-based frame prediction network that can better handle semantically informative objects and areas of different scales and capture spatial-temporal dependencies in normal videos. A noise tolerance loss is introduced during training to mitigate the interference caused by background noise. Extensive experiments have been conducted on the CUHK Avenue, ShanghaiTech Campus, and UCSD Pedestrian datasets, and the results show that our proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches. Remarkably, our proposed method obtains the frame-level AUROC score of 88.3% on the CUHK Avenue dataset.