Gun Source and Muzzle Head Detection
This addresses the need for protection against gun violence by enabling visual detection of shooters and gun muzzles in videos, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing object detection techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of gun source and muzzle head detection in videos by decomposing it into human object detection and gun smoke detection, with the assumption that the muzzle head lies between the shooter and the smoke. They report success in detecting the muzzle head through these methods, though no concrete numbers are provided.
There is a surging need across the world for protection against gun violence. There are three main areas that we have identified as challenging in research that tries to curb gun violence: temporal location of gunshots, gun type prediction and gun source (shooter) detection. Our task is gun source detection and muzzle head detection, where the muzzle head is the round opening of the firing end of the gun. We would like to locate the muzzle head of the gun in the video visually, and identify who has fired the shot. In our formulation, we turn the problem of muzzle head detection into two sub-problems of human object detection and gun smoke detection. Our assumption is that the muzzle head typically lies between the gun smoke caused by the shot and the shooter. We have interesting results both in bounding the shooter as well as detecting the gun smoke. In our experiments, we are successful in detecting the muzzle head by detecting the gun smoke and the shooter.