Natural language description of videos for smart surveillance

Abstract

After the September 11 attacks, security and surveillance measures have changed across the globe. Now, surveillance cameras are installed almost everywhere to monitor video footage. Though quite handy, these cameras produce videos in a massive size and volume. The major challenge faced by security agencies is the effort of analyzing the surveillance video data collected and generated daily. Problems related to these videos are twofold: (1) understanding the contents of video streams, and (2) conversion of the video contents to condensed formats, such as textual interpretations and summaries, to save storage space. In this paper, we have proposed a video description framework on a surveillance dataset. This framework is based on the multitask learning of high-level features (HLFs) using a convolutional neural network (CNN) and natural language generation (NLG) through bidirectional recurrent networks. For each specific task, a parallel pipeline is derived from the base visual geometry group (VGG)-16 model. Tasks include scene recognition, action recognition, object recognition and human face specific feature recognition. Experimental results on the TRECViD, UET Video Surveillance (UETVS) and AGRIINTRUSION datasets depict that the model outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a METEOR (Metric for Evaluation of Translation with Explicit ORdering) score of 33.9%, 34.3%, and 31.2%, respectively. Our results show that our framework has distinct advantages over traditional rule-based models for the recognition and generation of natural language descriptions.