# From Offline to Periodic Adaptation for Pose-Based Shoplifting Detection in Real-world Retail Security

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.04723 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04723/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09212/) (2019)
- [ByteTrack: Multi-Object Tracking by Associating Every Detection Box](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06864/) (2021)
- [Real-world Anomaly Detection in Surveillance Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04264/) (2018)
- [Future Frame Prediction for Anomaly Detection -- A New Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.09867/) (2017)
- [Revisiting Skeleton-based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13586/) (2021)
- [Anomaly Detection in Video via Self-Supervised and Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.07491/) (2020)
- [Learning Regularity in Skeleton Trajectories for Anomaly Detection in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03295/) (2019)
- [Generative Cooperative Learning for Unsupervised Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03962/) (2022)
- [Graph Embedded Pose Clustering for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11850/) (2019)
- [A Background-Agnostic Framework with Adversarial Training for Abnormal Event Detection in Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.12328/) (2020)
- [Rethinking the Heatmap Regression for Bottom-up Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15175/) (2020)
- [Video Anomaly Detection by Solving Decoupled Spatio-Temporal Jigsaw Puzzles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10172/) (2022)
- [Normalizing Flows for Human Pose Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10946/) (2022)
- [Multi-timescale Trajectory Prediction for Abnormal Human Activity Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04321/) (2019)
- [Follow the Rules: Reasoning for Video Anomaly Detection with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10299/) (2024)
- [Deep Contextual Attention for Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.07721/) (2019)
- [Continual Learning for Anomaly Detection in Surveillance Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07941/) (2020)
- [SSMTL++: Revisiting Self-Supervised Multi-Task Learning for Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08003/) (2022)
- [A Hierarchical Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Neural Network for Anomaly Detection in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04294/) (2021)
- [Online Anomaly Detection in Surveillance Videos with Asymptotic Bounds on False Alarm Rate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07110/) (2020)
- [Regularity Learning via Explicit Distribution Modeling for Skeletal Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03649/) (2021)
- [An Exploratory Study on Human-Centric Video Anomaly Detection through Variational Autoencoders and Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15395/) (2024)
- [CHAD: Charlotte Anomaly Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09258/) (2022)
- [Ancilia: Scalable Intelligent Video Surveillance for the Artificial Intelligence of Things](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.03561/) (2023)
- [Understanding the Challenges and Opportunities of Pose-based Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05463/) (2023)
- [Anomaly Detection with Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03689/) (2020)
- [Context-aware Video Anomaly Detection in Long-Term Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07887/) (2024)
- [Evaluating the Effectiveness of Video Anomaly Detection in the Wild: Online Learning and Inference for Real-world Deployment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18747/) (2024)
- [Multi-Task Learning based Video Anomaly Detection with Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07697/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [CodecSight: Leveraging Video Codec Signals for Efficient Streaming VLM Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.06036/) (2026)
- [From Frames to Events: Rethinking Evaluation in Human-Centric Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.09327/) (2026)
- [VQ-VAD: Vector-quantized Motion Representation Learning for Human-centric Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.05069/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Shoplifting is a growing operational and economic challenge for retailers, with incidents rising and losses increasing despite extensive video surveillance. Continuous human monitoring is infeasible, motivating automated, privacy-preserving, and resource-aware detection solutions. In this paper, we cast shoplifting detection as a pose-based, unsupervised video anomaly detection problem and introduce a periodic adaptation framework designed for on-site Internet of Things (IoT) deployment. Our approach enables edge devices in smart retail environments to adapt from streaming, unlabeled data, supporting scalable and low-latency anomaly detection across distributed camera networks. To support reproducibility, we introduce RetailS, a new large-scale real-world shoplifting dataset collected from a retail store under multi-day, multi-camera conditions, capturing unbiased shoplifting behavior in realistic IoT settings. For deployable operation, thresholds are selected using both F1 and H_PRS scores, the harmonic mean of precision, recall, and specificity, during data filtering and training. In periodic adaptation experiments, our framework consistently outperformed offline baselines on AUC-ROC and AUC-PR in 91.6% of evaluations, with each training update completing in under 30 minutes on edge-grade hardware, demonstrating the feasibility and reliability of our solution for IoT-enabled smart retail deployment.
