Deep Video Anomaly Detection: Opportunities and Challenges

Anomaly detection is a popular and vital task in various research contexts, which has been studied for several decades. To ensure the safety of people’s lives and assets, video surveillance has been widely deployed in various public spaces, such as crossroads, elevators, hospitals, banks, and even in private homes. Deep learning has shown its capacity in a number of domains, ranging from acoustics, images, to natural language processing. However, it is non-trivial to devise intelligent video anomaly detection systems cause anomalies significantly differ from each other in different application scenarios. There are numerous advantages if such intelligent systems could be realised in our daily lives, such as saving human resources in a large degree, reducing financial burden on the government, and identifying the anomalous behaviours timely and accurately. Recently, many studies on extending deep learning models for solving anomaly detection problems have emerged, resulting in beneficial advances in deep video anomaly detection techniques. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of deep learning-based methods to detect the video anomalies from a new perspective. Specifically, we summarise the opportunities and challenges of deep learning models on video anomaly detection tasks, respectively. We put forth several potential future research directions of intelligent video anomaly detection system in various application domains. Moreover, we summarise the characteristics and technical problems in current deep learning methods for video anomaly detection.