Anomalous Behavior Identification with Visual Federated Learning in Multi-UAVs Systems

Anomaly detection aims to identify data or behav-iors that are different from the usual patterns. In traditional anomaly detection settings, edge devices collect the data and send it to a centralized server for model training, which faces two critical issues: (1) it risks data exposure during transmission; (2) it demands a large amount of network bandwidth for data transfer. To tackle these problems, we propose a Visual Federated Learning algorithm (VFLA) for anomalous behavior identification in the multi-UAVs system. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to merge federated learning with video-based anomaly detection. VFLA consists of two phases: The initial phase is training a pseudo-label generator. UAVs collect a dataset and manually annotate it. This labeled data is then used to train the pseudo-label generator on the server, which is subsequently distributed back to the UAVs. The second phase is the federated learning-based anomaly detection model training. UAVs leverage the pseudo-label generator to automatically annotate the collected video footage. These annotated videos are fed into an anomaly detection network for training. Once the local training is completed, UAVs upload their local models to a server for federated aggregation. The global model is then redistributed to the UAVs for additional training rounds, until reach the target accuracy. Finally, we simulate the federated learning anomaly detection algorithm on the Shanghai-tech dataset, it demonstrates an average accuracy boost of 5.6% compared to baselines.