Vehicular Trajectory Classification and Traffic Anomaly Detection in Videos Using a Hybrid CNN-VAE Architecture

Visual surveillance has become indispensable in the evolution of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Video object trajectories are key to many of the visual surveillance applications. Classifying varying length time series data such as video object trajectories using conventional neural networks, can be challenging. In this paper, we propose trajectory classification and anomaly detection using a hybrid Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Variational Autoencoder (VAE) architecture. First, we introduce a high level features for varying length object trajectories using color gradient representation. In the next stage, a semi-supervised way to annotate moving object trajectories extracted using Temporally Incremental Gravitational Model (TIGM) is used for class labeling. For training, anomalous trajectories are identified using t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE). Finally, a hybrid CNN-VAE architecture has been proposed for trajectory classification and anomaly detection. The results obtained using publicly available surveillance video datasets reveal that the proposed method can successfully identify traffic anomalies such as violations in lane driving, sudden speed variations, abrupt termination of vehicle during movement, and vehicles moving in wrong directions. The accuracy of trajectory classification improves by a margin of 1-6% against popular neural networks-based classifiers across various datasets using the proposed high-level features. The gradient representation also improves the anomaly detection accuracy significantly (30-35%). Code and dataset can be found at
https://github.com/santhoshkelathodi/CNN-VAE
.