Violence detection in crowded scenes using substantial derivative

This paper presents a novel video descriptor based on substantial derivative, an important concept in fluid mechanics, that captures the rate of change of a fluid property as it travels through a velocity field. Unlike standard approaches that only use temporal motion information, our descriptor exploits the spatio-temporal characteristic of substantial derivative. In particular, the spatial and temporal motion patterns are captured by respectively the convective and local accelerations. After estimating the convective and local field from the optic flow, we followed the standard bag-of-word procedure for each motion pattern separately, and we concatenated the two resulting histograms to form the final descriptor. We extensively evaluated the effectiveness of the proposed method on five benchmarks, including three standard datasets (Violence in Movies, Violence In Crowd, and BEHAVE), and two new video-survelliance sequences downloaded from Youtube. Our experiments show how the proposed approach sets the new state-of-the-art on all benchmarks and how the structural information captured by convective acceleration is essential to detect violent episodes in crowded scenarios.