ACF: An Armed CCTV Footage Dataset for Enhancing Weapon Detection

Thailand, like other countries worldwide, has experienced instability in recent years. If current trends continue, the number of crimes endangering people or property will expand. Closed-circuit television (CCTV) technology is now commonly utilized for surveillance and monitoring to ensure people’s safety. A weapon detection system can help police officers with limited staff minimize their workload through on-screen surveillance. Since CCTV footage captures the entire incident scenario, weapon detection becomes challenging due to the small weapon objects in the footage. Due to public datasets providing inadequate information on our interested scope of CCTV image’s weapon detection, an Armed CCTV Footage (ACF) dataset, the self-collected mockup CCTV footage of pedestrians armed with pistols and knives, was collected for different scenarios. This study aimed to present an image tilling-based deep learning for small weapon object detection. The experiments were conducted on a public benchmark dataset (Mock Attack) to evaluate the detection performance. The proposed tilling approach achieved a significantly better mAP of 10.22 times. The image tiling approach was used to train different object detection models to analyze the improvement. On SSD MobileNet V2, the tiling ACF Dataset achieved an mAP of 0.758 on the pistol and knife evaluation. The proposed method for enhancing small weapon detection by using the tiling approach with our ACF Dataset can significantly enhance the performance of weapon detection.