Rapid detection of camera tampering and abnormal disturbance for video surveillance system

•Camera tampering and abnormalities are examined for video surveillance system.•Brightness, edge details, and histogram information are computationally efficient.•The system runs at 20–30 frames/s, meeting the requirement of real-time operation.•An average of 4.4% of missed events indicates the feasibility of proposed method.

Camera tampering may indicate that a criminal act is occurring. Common examples of camera tampering are turning the camera lens to point to a different direction (i.e., camera motion) and covering the lens by opaque objects or with paint (i.e., camera occlusion). Moreover, various abnormalities such as screen shaking, fogging, defocus, color cast, and screen flickering can strongly deteriorate the performance of a video surveillance system. This study proposes an automated method for rapidly detecting camera tampering and various abnormalities for a video surveillance system. The proposed method is based on the analyses of brightness, edge details, histogram distribution, and high-frequency information, making it computationally efficient. The proposed system runs at a frame rate of 20–30 frames/s, meeting the requirement of real-time operation. Experimental results show the superiority of the proposed method with an average of 4.4% of missed events compared to existing works.