Autoencoder-based unsupervised one-class learning for abnormal activity detection in egocentric videos

In recent years, abnormal human activity detection has become an important research topic. However, most existing methods focus on detecting abnormal activities of pedestrians in surveillance videos; even those methods using egocentric videos deal with the activities of pedestrians around the camera wearer. In this paper, the authors present an unsupervised auto-encoder-based network trained by one-class learning that inputs RGB image sequences recorded by egocentric cameras to detect abnormal activities of the camera wearers themselves. To improve the performance of network, the authors introduce a ‘re-encoding’ architecture and a regularisation loss function term, minimising the KL divergence between the distributions of features extracted by the first and second encoders. Unlike the common use of KL divergence loss to obtain a feature distribution close to an already-known distribution, the aim is to encourage the features extracted by the second encoder to have a close distribution to those extracted from the first encoder. The authors evaluate the proposed method on the Epic-Kitchens-55 dataset and conduct an ablation study to analyse the functions of different components. Experimental results demonstrate that the method outperforms the comparison methods in all cases and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed re-encoding architecture and the regularisation term.