# Learning a distance function with a Siamese network to localize anomalies in videos

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.09189 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.09189/

## Key facts

- Cited by 31 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 24 Jan 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Self-Supervised Predictive Convolutional Attentive Block for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09099/) (2021)
- [UBnormal: New Benchmark for Supervised Open-Set Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.08644/) (2021)
- [CLIP-TSA: CLIP-Assisted Temporal Self-Attention for Weakly-Supervised Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05136/) (2022)
- [Generalized Video Anomaly Event Detection: Systematic Taxonomy and Comparison of Deep Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05087/) (2023)
- [Advancing Video Anomaly Detection: A Concise Review and a New Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04857/) (2024)
- [SSMTL++: Revisiting Self-Supervised Multi-Task Learning for Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08003/) (2022)
- [Hierarchical Semantic Contrast for Scene-aware Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13051/) (2023)
- [Self-Distilled Masked Auto-Encoders are Efficient Video Anomaly Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.12041/) (2023)
- [Self-Supervised Masked Convolutional Transformer Block for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.12148/) (2022)
- [Learning Not to Reconstruct Anomalies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.09742/) (2021)
- [Deep Learning for Video Anomaly Detection: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.05383/) (2024)
- [DyAnNet: A Scene Dynamicity Guided Self-Trained Video Anomaly Detection Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00882/) (2022)
- [Exploring Diffusion Models for Unsupervised Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05841/) (2023)
- [MULDE: Multiscale Log-Density Estimation via Denoising Score Matching for Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14497/) (2024)
- [Deep Anomaly Discovery From Unlabeled Videos via Normality Advantage and Self-Paced Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01975/) (2021)
- [EVAL: Explainable Video Anomaly Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07900/) (2022)
- [Context Recovery and Knowledge Retrieval: A Novel Two-Stream Framework for Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.02899/) (2022)
- [Learnable Locality-Sensitive Hashing for Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07839/) (2021)
- [Video Anomaly Detection via Spatio-Temporal Pseudo-Anomaly Generation : A Unified Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16514/) (2023)
- [PseudoBound: Limiting the anomaly reconstruction capability of one-class classifiers using pseudo anomalies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10704/) (2023)
- [Track Any Anomalous Object: A Granular Video Anomaly Detection Pipeline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05175/) (2025)
- [Aligning Effective Tokens with Video Anomaly in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06350/) (2025)
- [Ano-Graph: Learning Normal Scene Contextual Graphs to Detect Video Anomalies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10502/) (2021)
- [The Evolution of Video Anomaly Detection: A Unified Framework from DNN to MLLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21649/) (2025)
- [Leveraging Multimodal LLM Descriptions of Activity for Explainable Semi-Supervised Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14896/) (2025)
- [Spatio-temporal predictive tasks for abnormal event detection in videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15741/) (2022)
- [Lightning Fast Video Anomaly Detection via Adversarial Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15597/) (2022)
- [Object-centric and memory-guided normality reconstruction for video anomaly detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03677/) (2022)
- [Anomaly Detection with Prototype-Guided Discriminative Latent Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14945/) (2021)
- [Contextual Information Based Anomaly Detection for a Multi-Scene UAV Aerial Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15437/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This work introduces a new approach to localize anomalies in surveillance video. The main novelty is the idea of using a Siamese convolutional neural network (CNN) to learn a distance function between a pair of video patches (spatio-temporal regions of video). The learned distance function, which is not specific to the target video, is used to measure the distance between each video patch in the testing video and the video patches found in normal training video. If a testing video patch is not similar to any normal video patch then it must be anomalous. We compare our approach to previously published algorithms using 4 evaluation measures and 3 challenging target benchmark datasets. Experiments show that our approach either surpasses or performs comparably to current state-of-the-art methods.