Observe locally, infer globally: A space-time MRF for detecting abnormal activities with incremental updates

We propose a space-time Markov random field (MRF) model to detect abnormal activities in video. The nodes in the MRF graph correspond to a grid of local regions in the video frames, and neighboring nodes in both space and time are associated with links. To learn normal patterns of activity at each local node, we capture the distribution of its typical optical flow with a mixture of probabilistic principal component analyzers. For any new optical flow patterns detected in incoming video clips, we use the learned model and MRF graph to compute a maximum a posteriori estimate of the degree of normality at each local node. Further, we show how to incrementally update the current model parameters as new video…