Abstract: 

The problem of scene classification in surveillance footage is of great importance for ensuring security in public areas. With challenges such as low quality feeds, occlusion, viewpoint variations, background clutter etc. The task is both challenging and error-prone. Therefore it is important to keep the false positives low to maintain a high accuracy of detection. In this paper, we adapt high performing CNN architectures to identify abandoned luggage in a surveillance feed. We explore several CNN based approaches, from Transfer Learning on the Imagenet dataset to object classification using Faster R-CNNs on the COCO dataset. Using network visualization techniques, we gain insight into what the neural network sees and the basis of classification decision. The experiments have been conducted on real world datasets, and highlights the complexity in such classifications. Obtained results indicate that a combination of proposed techniques outperforms the individual approaches.

Bio: 

Utkarsh Contractor is the Director of AI at Aisera, where he leads the data science team working on machine learning and artificial intelligence applications in the fields of Natural Language Processing and Vision. He is also pursuing his graduate degree at Stanford University, focussing his research and experiments on computer vision, using CNNs to analyze surveillance scene imagery and footages. Utkarsh has a decade of industry experience in Information Retrieval and Machine Learning working at companies such as LinkedIn and AT&T Labs.