Integrative Review of Human Activity Recognition and Violence Detection: Exploring Techniques, Modalities, and Cross-Domain Knowledge Transfer

Abstract

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) is a key topic of research in computer vision having numerous applications in surveillance, healthcare, and robotics. Violence detection (VD) is also an exciting research area under activity recognition, and success in this field would offer the possibilities of reduced crime rate as well as more accurate and scalable error-free monitoring for surveillance applications. Unlike other review papers that generally handle HAR only or VD only as different topics, this review paper carries out a systematic literature review of both HAR and VD with the aim of relating the two and possibly opening up possibilities of knowledge transfer. Our goal is to identify how the best methods and techniques used in HAR can be adapted for VD and vice versa to improve feature extraction, increase accuracies, and create more robust models. In this systematic literature review paper, over 100 papers were studied to obtain information about the most recent methods and techniques being used. Some of the key takeaways this review proposes include the usage of Transformer-based techniques and Graphical Convolutional Network methods that perform well for HAR for VD, more experimentation using Recurrent Neural Network-based methods that perform well for VD for HAR, and also more work needs to be done to improve model performance on datasets in unconstrained environments.

Received: 12 August 2024 | Revised: 5 November 2024 | Accepted: 13 March 2025

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest to this work.

Data Availability Statement

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analyzed in this study.

Author Contribution Statement

Paul Turyahabwa: Conceptualization, Methodology, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Resources, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Visualization, Supervision, Project administration. Sudi Murindanyi: Conceptualization, Methodology, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Resources, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Visualization, Supervision, Project administration.