Our students receive the Alper Atalay Best Student Paper Award in SİU 2021

The video anomaly detection study prepared by Ali Enver Bilecen, graduate student at Sabancı University Electronics Engineering Program, Alp Özalp and M. Sami Yavuz, senior students in the program, with Hüseyin Özkan, member of Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences as the advisor, was found deserving of the Alper Atalay Best Student Paper Award in the field of machine vision and pattern recognition in the 29th IEEE Conference on Signal Processing and Communications Applications.

Ali Enver Bilecen, Alp Özalp, M. Sami Yavuz 

Our students’ project entitled “Video Anomaly Detection via Autoregressive Modelling of Covariance Features”, receiving the best paper award in the field of machine vision and pattern recognition, offers deep learning-based innovative methods that can detect the location of extraordinary events in a scene.  

In the project, anomalies observed in a video scene were basically divided into two categories and methods were developed accordingly. The first category involves anomalies caused by objects in unusual forms and appearances. For example, motor vehicles violating pedestrian crossings can be detected via their forms and appearances. The second category involves anomalies that occur as a result of unexpected movements of objects in time. An example of this is an incidence of bagsnatching. 

The method developed in the project to detect anomalies summarizes form and movement information in a scene through covariance features, and models the temporal dynamics of these features via the long short-term memory’s artificial neural networks. Then, form and movement information is merged through probability models to develop a joint decision-making mechanism to detect anomalies. Our success rate of up to 90% on the data sets that are commonly used in the literature shows that our approach offers an effective solution to the problem of video anomaly detection. 

About SİU and the Alper Atalay Best Student Paper Award

SIU (the Conference on Signal Processing and Communications Applications) was held for the first time in 1993. The conference features original projects in theoretical and practical fields of signal processing and communications. It is one of the most comprehensive scientific events in Turkey. 

The Alper Atalay Best Student Paper Award within the framework of the Conference on Signal Processing and Communications Applications is given in memory of Alper Atalay, who graduated from Boğaziçi University Electrical-Electronics Engineering Department in 1993 with an honors degree, and tragically lost his life in car accident on August 16, 1998.