Collaborative Learning of Anomalies with Privacy (CLAP) for Unsupervised Video Anomaly Detection: A New Baseline

Unsupervised (US) video anomaly detection (VAD) in surveillance applications is gaining more popularity recently due to its practical real-world applications. As surveillance videos are privacy sensitive and the availability of large-scale video data may enable better US-VAD systems, collaborative learning can be highly rewarding in this setting. However, due to the extremely challenging nature of the US-VAD task, where learning is carried out without any annotations, privacy-preserving collaborative learning of US-VAD systems has not been studied yet. In this paper, we propose a new baseline for anomaly detection capable of localizing anomalous events in complex surveillance videos in a fully unsupervised fashion without any labels on a privacy-preserving participant-based distributed training configuration. Additionally, we propose three new evaluation protocols to benchmark anomaly detection approaches on various scenarios of collaborations and data availability. Based on these protocols, we modify existing VAD datasets to extensively evaluate our approach as well as existing US SOTA methods on two large-scale datasets including UCF-Crime and XD-Violence. All proposed evaluation protocols, dataset splits, and codes are available here: https://github.com/AnasEmad11/CLAP.