  Anomaly detection in videos refers to the identification of events that do
not conform to expected behavior. However, almost all existing methods tackle
the problem by minimizing the reconstruction errors of training data, which
cannot guarantee a larger reconstruction error for an abnormal event. In this
paper, we propose to tackle the anomaly detection problem within a video
prediction framework. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that
leverages the difference between a predicted future frame and its ground truth
to detect an abnormal event. To predict a future frame with higher quality for
normal events, other than the commonly used appearance (spatial) constraints on
intensity and gradient, we also introduce a motion (temporal) constraint in
video prediction by enforcing the optical flow between predicted frames and
ground truth frames to be consistent, and this is the first work that
introduces a temporal constraint into the video prediction task. Such spatial
and motion constraints facilitate the future frame prediction for normal
events, and consequently facilitate to identify those abnormal events that do
not conform the expectation. Extensive experiments on both a toy dataset and
some publicly available datasets validate the effectiveness of our method in
terms of robustness to the uncertainty in normal events and the sensitivity to
abnormal events.
