# Interpretable Human Activity Recognition for Subtle Robbery Detection in Surveillance Videos

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14329 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14329/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 4 of its 11 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [NTU RGB+D 120: A Large-Scale Benchmark for 3D Human Activity Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04757/) (2019)
- [Disentangling and Unifying Graph Convolutions for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14111/) (2020)
- [3Mformer: Multi-order Multi-mode Transformer for Skeletal Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14474/) (2023)
- [Video Violence Recognition and Localization Using a Semi-Supervised Hard Attention Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.02212/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Non-violent street robberies (snatch-and-run) are difficult to detect automatically because they are brief, subtle, and often indistinguishable from benign human interactions in unconstrained surveillance footage. This paper presents a hybrid, pose-driven approach for detecting snatch-and-run events that combines real-time perception with an interpretable classification stage suitable for edge deployment. The system uses a YOLO-based pose estimator to extract body keypoints for each tracked person and computes kinematic and interaction features describing hand speed, arm extension, proximity, and relative motion between an aggressor-victim pair. A Random Forest classifier is trained on these descriptors, and a temporal hysteresis filter is applied to stabilize frame-level predictions and reduce spurious alarms. We evaluate the method on a staged dataset and on a disjoint test set collected from internet videos, demonstrating promising generalization across different scenes and camera viewpoints. Finally, we implement the complete pipeline on an NVIDIA Jetson Nano and report real-time performance, supporting the feasibility of proactive, on-device robbery detection.