Handgun detection using combined human pose and weapon appearance

CCTV surveillance systems are essential nowadays to prevent and mitigate security threats or dangerous situations such as mass shootings or terrorist attacks, in which early detection is crucial. These solutions are manually supervised by a security operator, which has significant limitations. Novel deep learning-based methods have allowed to develop automatic and real time weapon detectors with promising results. However, these approaches are based on visual weapon appearance only and no additional contextual information is exploited. For handguns, body pose may be a useful cue, especially in cases where the gun is barely visible and also as a way to reduce false positives. In this work, a novel method is proposed to combine, in a single architecture, both weapon appearance and 2D human pose information. First, pose keypoints are estimated to extract hand regions and generate binary pose images, which are the model inputs. Then, each input is processed with a different subnetwork to extract two feature maps. Finally, this information is combined to produce the hand region prediction (handgun vs no-handgun). A new dataset composed of samples collected from different sources has been used to evaluate model performance under different situations. Moreover, the robustness of the model to different brightness and weapon size conditions (simulating conditions in which appearance is degraded by low light and distance to the camera) have also been tested. Results obtained show that the combined model improves overall performance substantially with respect to appearance alone as used by other popular methods such as YOLOv3.