Criminal Intention Detection at Early Stages of Shoplifting Cases by Using 3D Convolutional Neural Networks

• Main Authors: Guillermo A. Martínez-Mascorro, José R. Abreu-Pederzini, José C. Ortiz-Bayliss, Angel Garcia-Collantes, Hugo Terashima-Marín
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-02-01
• Series: Computation
• Subjects: 3D convolutional neural networks; crime prevention; pre-crime behavior method; shoplifting; suspicious behavior
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2079-3197/9/2/24

Crime generates significant losses, both human and economic. Every year, billions of dollars are lost due to attacks, crimes, and scams. Surveillance video camera networks generate vast amounts of data, and the surveillance staff cannot process all the information in real-time. Human sight has critical limitations. Among those limitations, visual focus is one of the most critical when dealing with surveillance. For example, in a surveillance room, a crime can occur in a different screen segment or on a distinct monitor, and the surveillance staff may overlook it. Our proposal focuses on shoplifting crimes by analyzing situations that an average person will consider as typical conditions, but may eventually lead to a crime. While other approaches identify the crime itself, we instead model suspicious behavior—the one that may occur before the build-up phase of a crime—by detecting precise segments of a video with a high probability of containing a shoplifting crime. By doing so, we provide the staff with more opportunities to act and prevent crime. We implemented a 3DCNN model as a video feature extractor and tested its performance on a dataset composed of daily action and shoplifting samples. The results are encouraging as the model correctly classifies suspicious behavior in most of the scenarios where it was tested. For example, when classifying suspicious behavior, the best model generated in this work obtains precision and recall values of 0.8571 and 1 in one of the test scenarios, respectively.