WVD: A New Synthetic Dataset for Video-Based Violence Detection

Abstract

Violence detection is becoming increasingly relevant in many areas such as for automatic content filtering, video surveillance and law enforcement. Existing datasets and methods discriminate between violent and non-violent scenes based on very abstract definitions of violence. Available datasets, such as “Hockey Fight” and “Movies”, only contain fight versus non-fight videos; no weapons are discriminated in them. In this paper, we focus explicitly on weapon-based fighting sequences and propose a new dataset based on the popular action-adventure video game Grand Theft Auto-V (GTA-V). This new dataset is called “Weapon Violence Dataset” (WVD). The choice for a virtual dataset follows a trend which allows creating and labelling as sophisticated and large volume, yet realistic, datasets as possible. Furthermore, WVD also avoids the drawbacks of access to real data and potential implications. To the best of our knowledge no similar dataset, that captures weapon-based violence, exists. The paper evaluates the proposed dataset by utilising local feature descriptors using an SVM classifier. The extracted features are aggregated using the Bag of Visual Word (BoVW) technique to classify weapon-based violence videos. Our results indicate that SURF achieves the best performance.