Enhancing Video Surveillance with Deep Learning-Based Real-Time Handgun Detection and Tracking

Handguns, pistols, and revolvers are commonly used in today’s world for committing criminal acts, requiring the need for effective surveillance and control systems. However, despite the advancement of security systems, human monitoring and involvement are still necessary to effectively combat these crimes. This paper provides a robust automated handgun identification technique for recorded videos and live CCTV footage that may be used for both control and surveillance purposes. Automatic detection of firearms is crucial for improving people’s protection and safety, however, it is a challenging task because of the numerous differences in design, size, and appearance of firearms. In recent years, object detectors have improved, yielding better findings and shorter inference times. The authors used cutting-edge object detector YOLOv7 for firearm detection. A varied and demanding dataset of 15,367 images for weapon identification is also proposed, which is carefully annotated for weapon localization and classification. After analysing the data, it is determined that the model achieves an accuracy rate of 96.80% and recall rate of 90.37%.