Convolutional Models for the Detection of Firearms in Surveillance Videos

Closed-circuit television monitoring systems used for surveillance do not provide an immediate response in situations of danger such as armed robbery. In addition, they have multiple limitations when human operators perform the monitoring. For these reasons, a firearms detection system was developed using a new large database that was created from images extracted from surveillance videos of situations in which there are people with firearms. The system is made up of two parts—the “Front End” and “Back End”. The Front End is comprised of the YOLO object detection and localization system, and the Back End is made up of the firearms detection model that is developed in this work. These two systems are used to focus the detection system only in areas of the image where there are people, disregarding all other irrelevant areas. The performance of the firearm detection system was analyzed using multiple convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures, finding values up to 86% in metrics like recall and precision in a network configuration based on VGG Net using grayscale images.