Automatic anomaly detection is a crucial task in video surveillance system intensively used for public safety and others. The present system adopts a spatial branch and a temporal branch in a unified network that exploits both spatial and temporal information effectively. The network has a residual autoencoder architecture, consisting of a deep convolutional neural network-based encoder and a multi-stage channel attention-based decoder, trained in an unsupervised manner. The temporal shift method is used for exploiting the temporal feature, whereas the contextual dependency is extracted by channel attention modules. System performance is evaluated using three standard benchmark datasets. Result suggests that our network outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, achieving 97.4% for UCSD Ped2, 86.7% for CUHK Avenue, and 73.6% for ShanghaiTech dataset in term of Area Under Curve, respectively.

Video surveillance systems are widely deployed with large systems for use in strategic places such as home security, public transportation, banks, ATM centers, city centers, airports, and public roads, and play a vital role in protecting critical infrastructures. As various attacks are possible in these systems, identifying attacks and considering suitable security measures are essential. In this paper, we present a detailed review of existing and possible threats in video surveillance, CCTV, and IP-camera systems. This provides insight for the better identification of the security risks associated with the design and deployment of these systems and promotes further research in this emerging field. We also present countermeasures to prevent and protect the surveillance systems from various security attacks.

Drones with obstacle avoidance capabilities have attracted much attention from researchers recently. They typically adopt either supervised learning or reinforcement learning (RL) for training their networks. The drawback of supervised learning is that labeling of the massive dataset is laborious and time-consuming, whereas RL aims to overcome such a problem by letting an agent learn with the data from its environment. The present study aims to utilize diverse RL within two categories: (1) discrete action space and (2) continuous action space. The former has the advantage in optimization for vision datasets, but such actions can lead to unnatural behavior. For the latter, we propose a U-net based segmentation model with an actor-critic network. Performance is compared between these RL algorithms with three different environments such as the woodland, block world, and the arena world, as well as racing with human pilots. Results suggest that our best continuous algorithm easily outperformed the discrete ones and yet was similar to an expert pilot.

Recently, machine learning has been very useful in solving diverse tasks with drones, such as autonomous navigation, visual surveillance, communication, disaster management, and agriculture. Among these machine learning, two representative paradigms have been widely utilized in such applications: supervised learning and reinforcement learning. Researchers prefer to use supervised learning, mostly based on convolutional neural networks, because of its robustness and ease of use but yet data labeling is laborious and time-consuming. On the other hand, when traditional reinforcement learning is combined with the deep neural network, it can be a very powerful tool to solve high-dimensional input problems such as image and video. Along with the fast development of reinforcement learning, many researchers utilize reinforcement learning in drone applications, and it often outperforms supervised learning. However, it usually requires the agent to explore the environment on a trial-and-error basis which is high cost and unrealistic in the real environment. Recent advances in simulated environments can allow an agent to learn by itself to overcome these drawbacks, although the gap between the real environment and the simulator has to be minimized in the end. In this sense, a realistic and reliable simulator is essential for reinforcement learning training. This paper investigates various drone simulators that work with diverse reinforcement learning architectures. The characteristics of the reinforcement learning-based drone simulators are analyzed and compared for the researchers who would like to employ them for their projects. Finally, we shed light on some challenges and potential directions for future drone simulators.