Automatic Handgun Detection with Deep Learning in Video Surveillance Images

There is a great need to implement preventive mechanisms against shootings and terrorist acts in public spaces with a large influx of people. While surveillance cameras have become common, the need for monitoring 24/7 and real-time response requires automatic detection methods. This paper presents a study based on three convolutional neural network (CNN) models applied to the automatic detection of handguns in video surveillance images. It aims to investigate the reduction of false positives by including pose information associated with the way the handguns are held in the images belonging to the training dataset. The results highlighted the best average precision (96.36%) and recall (97.23%) obtained by RetinaNet fine-tuned with the unfrozen ResNet-50 backbone and the best precision (96.23%) and F1 score values (93.36%) obtained by YOLOv3 when it was trained on the dataset including pose information. This last architecture was the only one that showed a consistent improvement-around 2%-when pose information was expressly considered during training.

Automated summary

This study focuses on automatic detection of handguns in video surveillance images using three convolutional neural network models. Results show that including pose information can reduce false positives, with the YOLOv3 model trained on dataset including pose information demonstrating the best performance.