Anomaly Detection for People with Visual Impairments using an Egocentric 360-Degree Camera

Inpyo Song, Sanghyeon Lee, Minjun Joo, Jangwon Lee; Proceedings of the Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2025, pp. 2828-2837

Recent advancements in computer vision have led to a renewed interest in developing assistive technologies for individuals with visual impairments. Although extensive research has been conducted in the field of computer vision-based assistive technologies most of the focus has been on understanding contexts in images rather than addressing their physical safety and security concerns. To address this challenge we propose the first step towards detecting anomalous situations for visually impaired people by observing their entire surroundings using an egocentric 360-degree camera. We first introduce a novel egocentric 360-degree video dataset called VIEW360 (Visually Impaired Equipped with Wearable 360-degree camera) which contains abnormal activities that visually impaired individuals may encounter such as shoulder surfing and pickpocketing. Furthermore we propose a new architecture called the FDPN (Frame and Direction Prediction Network) which facilitates frame-level prediction of abnormal events and identifying of their directions. Finally we evaluate our approach on our VIEW360 dataset and the publicly available UCF-Crime and Shanghaitech datasets demonstrating state-of-the-art performance.