LOCALIZING FIREARM CARRIERS BY IDENTIFYING HUMAN-OBJECT PAIRS

Visual identification of gunmen in a crowd is a challenging problem, that requires resolving the association of a person with an object (firearm). We present a novel approach to address this problem, by defining human-object interaction (and non-interaction) bounding boxes. In a given image, human and firearms are separately detected. Each detected human is paired with each detected firearm, allowing us to create a paired bounding box that contains both object and the human. A network is trained to classify these paired-bounding-boxes into human carrying the identified firearm or not. Extensive experiments were performed to evaluate effectiveness of the algorithm, including exploiting full pose of the human, hand keypoints, and their association with the firearm. The knowledge of spatially localized features is key to success of our method by using multi-size proposals with adaptive average pooling. We have also extended a previously firearm detection dataset, by adding more images and tagging in extended dataset the human-firearm pairs (including bounding boxes for firearms and gunmen). The experimental results (78.5 APhold) demonstrate effectiveness of the proposed method.