Rethinking Video Anomaly Detection - A Continual Learning Approach

While video anomaly detection has been an active area of research for several years, recent progress is limited to improving the state-of-the-art results on small datasets using an inadequate evaluation criterion. In this work, we take a new comprehensive look at the video anomaly detection problem from a more realistic perspective. Specifically, we consider practical challenges such as continual learning and few-shot learning, which humans can easily do but remains to be a significant challenge for machines. A novel algorithm designed for such practical challenges is also proposed. For performance evaluation in this new framework, we introduce a new dataset which is significantly more comprehensive than the existing benchmark datasets, and a new performance metric which takes into account the fundamental temporal aspect of video anomaly detection. The experimental results show that the existing state-of-the-art methods are not suitable for the considered practical challenges, and the proposed algorithm outperforms them with a large margin in continual learning and few-shot learning tasks.