GridHTM: Grid-Based Hierarchical Temporal Memory for Anomaly Detection in Videos
Peer reviewed, Journal article
Published version
View/ Open
Date
2023Metadata
Show full item recordCollections
Abstract
The interest in video anomaly detection systems that can detect different types of anomalies,
such as violent behaviours in surveillance videos, has gained traction in recent years. The current
approaches employ deep learning to perform anomaly detection in videos, but this approach has
multiple problems. For example, deep learning in general has issues with noise, concept drift,
explainability, and training data volumes. Additionally, anomaly detection in itself is a complex
task and faces challenges such as unknownness, heterogeneity, and class imbalance. Anomaly
detection using deep learning is therefore mainly constrained to generative models such as generative
adversarial networks and autoencoders due to their unsupervised nature; however, even they suffer
from general deep learning issues and are hard to properly train. In this paper, we explore the
capabilities of the Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM) algorithm to perform anomaly detection
in videos, as it has favorable properties such as noise tolerance and online learning which combats
concept drift. We introduce a novel version of HTM, named GridHTM, which is a grid-based HTM
architecture specifically for anomaly detection in complex videos such as surveillance footage. We
have tested GridHTM using the VIRAT video surveillance dataset, and the subsequent evaluation
results and online learning capabilities prove the great potential of using our system for real-time
unsupervised anomaly detection in complex videos.