TEVAD: Improved video anomaly detection with captions

Video surveillance systems are used to enhance the public safety and private assets. Automatic anomaly detection is vital in such surveillance systems to reduce the human labor and its associated costs. Previous works only consider spatial-temporal features. In many complex real-world scenarios, such visual features are unable to capture the semantic meanings required to further improve accuracy. To deal with such issues, we propose a novel framework: Text Empowered Video Anomaly Detection (TEVAD) which utilizes both visual and text features. Text features complements the visual features as they are semantically rich. Specifically, we compute text features based on the captions of the videos to capture the semantic meanings of abnormal events and thus improve the overall performance of video anomaly detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art results on four benchmark datasets (i.e. ShanghaiTech, UCF-Crime, XD-Violence, and UCSD-Pedestrians) and achieves improved robustness. We further analyze the captions to provide additional explainability for the anomalous videos identified by our proposed algorithm. Our codes are available at https://github.com/coranholmes/TEVAD.