A Shallow System Prototype for Violent Action Detection in Italian Public Schools

This paper presents a novel low-cost integrated system prototype, called School Violence Detection system (SVD), based on a 2D Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). It is used for classifying and identifying automatically violent actions in educational environments based on shallow cost hardware. Moreover, the paper fills the gap of real datasets in educational environments by proposing a new one, called Daily School Break dataset (DSB), containing original videos recorded in an Italian high school yard. The proposed CNN has been pre-trained with an ImageNet model and a transfer learning approach. To extend its capabilities, the DSB was enriched with online images representing students in school environments. Experimental results analyze the classification performances of the SVD and investigate how it performs through the proposed DSB dataset. The SVD, which achieves a recognition accuracy of 95%, is considered computably efficient and low-cost. It could be adapted to other scenarios such as school arenas, gyms, playgrounds, etc.