A Scalable and Generalised Deep Learning Framework for Anomaly Detection in Surveillance Videos

Anomaly detection in videos is challenging due to the complexity, noise, and diverse nature of activities such as violence, shoplifting, and vandalism. While deep learning (DL) has shown excellent performance in this area, existing approaches have struggled to apply DL models across different anomaly tasks without extensive retraining. This repeated retraining is time-consuming, computationally intensive, and unfair. To address this limitation, a new DL framework is introduced in this study, consisting of three key components: transfer learning to enhance feature generalization, model fusion to improve feature representation, and multitask classification to generalize the classifier across multiple tasks without training from scratch when a new task is introduced. The framework’s main advantage is its ability to generalize without requiring retraining from scratch for each new task. Empirical evaluations demonstrate the framework’s effectiveness, achieving an accuracy of 97.99% on the RLVS (violence detection), 83.59% on the UCF dataset (shoplifting detection), and 88.37% across both datasets using a single classifier without retraining. Additionally, when tested on an unseen dataset, the framework achieved an accuracy of 87.25% and 79.39% on violence and shoplifting datasets, respectively. The study also utilises two explainability tools to identify potential biases, ensuring robustness and fairness. This research represents the first successful resolution of the generalization issue in anomaly detection, marking a significant advancement in the field.