Real-time gun detection in CCTV: An open problem

Object detectors have improved in recent years, obtaining better results and faster inference time. However, small object detection is still a problem that has not yet a definitive solution. The autonomous weapons detection on Closed-circuit television (CCTV) has been studied recently, being extremely useful in the field of security, counter-terrorism, and risk mitigation. This article presents a new dataset obtained from a real CCTV installed in a university and the generation of synthetic images, to which Faster R-CNN was applied using Feature Pyramid Network with ResNet-50 resulting in a weapon detection model able to be used in quasi-real-time CCTV (90 ms of inference time with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX-1080Ti card) improving the state of the art on weapon detection in a two stages training. In this work, an exhaustive experimental study of the detector with these datasets was performed, showing the impact of synthetic datasets on the training of weapons detection systems, as well as the main limitations that these systems present nowadays. The generated synthetic dataset and the real CCTV dataset are available to the whole research community.