A Handheld Gun Detection using Faster R-CNN Deep Learning
Gyanendra K. Verma Anamika Dhillon
Department of Computer Engineering
National Institute of Technology
Kurukshetra, Haryana
gyanendra@nitkkr.ac.in
ABSTRACT
Today’s, most of the criminal activities are taken place using hand-
held arms particularly gun, pistol and revolver. Several surveys re-
vealed that hand held gun is the foremost weapon used for diverse
crimes like burglary, rape, etc. Therefore, automatic gun detection
is a prime requirement in current scenario and this paper presents
automatic gun detection from cluttered scene using Convolutional
Neural Networks (CNN). We have used Deep Convolutional Net-
work (DCN), a state-of-the-art Faster Region-based CNN model,
through transfer learning, for automatic gun detection from clut-
tered scenes. We have evaluated our gun detection over Internet
Movie Firearms Database (IMFDB), a benchmark gun database. For
detecting the visual handheld gun, we got propitious performance
of our system. Moreover, we demonstrate that, against the number
of several training images, CNN model magnifies the classification
accuracy, which is most advantageous in those practices where
generous liberal is often not available.
CCS CONCEPTS
• Computing methodologies → Image processing;
KEYWORDS
Gun Detection, Video Surveillance, DCN, CNN, VGG Net, Deep
Learning
ACM Reference Format:
Gyanendra K. Verma and Anamika Dhillon. 2017. A Handheld Gun De-
tection using Faster R-CNN Deep Learning. In ICCCT-2017: International
Conference on Computer and Communication Technology, November 24–
26, 2017, Allahabad, India, Jennifer B. Sartor, Theo D’Hondt, and Wolf-
gang De Meuter (Eds.). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 4, 5 pages.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3154979.3154988
1 INTRODUCTION
Today, most of the criminal activities are taken place using hand-
held arms particularly gun, pistol and revolver. The crime and
social offence can be reduced by monitoring such activities and
to identify antisocial behavior so that law enforcement agencies
can take appropriate action in early stage[6] [16]. The solution of
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ICCCT-2017, November 24–26, 2017, Allahabad, India
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ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-5324-3/17/11. . . $15.00
https://doi.org/10.1145/3154979.3154988
Department of Computer Engineering
National Institute of Technology
Kurukshetra, Haryana
dhillon.anamika2390@gmail.com
this problem is to deploy surveillance system or control cameras
with automatic handheld gun detection and alert system. In last
few years, deep learning has established a landmark in the area
of machine learning particularly in object detection, classification
and image segmentation. Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)
achieved best results so far in classical image processing problems
such as image segmentation, classification and detection in several
applications.
In this paper we present an automatic handheld gun detection
system using deep learning particularly CNN model. Gundetection
is a very challenging problem because of the various subtleties as-
sociated with it. One of the most important challenges of gun detec-
tion is occlusion of gun that arises frequently. There are two types
of occlusions of gun, namely gun to object and gun to site/scene
occlusion. Normally, occlusions in gun detection are arises beneath
three conditions: self-occlusion, inter-object occlusion or by back-
ground site/scene structure. Self-occlusion arises when one portion
of the gun is occluded by another. Inter-object occlusion occurs
when some different object like hand, clothes etc. occluded the gun.
Though those occlusion, which takes places due to background,
occurs while the gun is occluded by the structure in the background.
These occlusions can be of two types either partial or full. Partial
or full occlusion takes place due to carrying of guns in either hand
or in a halter. There are many methods to handle occlusion based
on depth analysis [7] of object from the camera, fusion of color and
shape features of object [2] and optimal position of camera [18].
Inter class variation in guns occurs due to variation in color
and structure of different models of guns. Guns are extensively
accessible in various colors like silver, black etc., because of which
detection of images is a challenging task. View variation in gun
detection arises due to different 2-D view of a gun from different
viewpoints or orientation. Rotation variation in gun detection arises
due to rotation of objects in its plane whereas scale variation ap-
pears because of shifting in distance of gun from CCTV, when it
takes the video.
Some other problems that arise during gun detection are noises
in gun image, deformation of gun and real time processing require-
ment. During the transportation and addition of images, noises
can occur in that image. Various types of noises can be there like
salt and pepper noise, Raleigh noise, Gaussian noise, etc. and these
noises can be introduced during varied conditions of transporta-
tion and addition of noises. The rest paper is organized as follows:
related work is given under section 2. The methodology with deep
learning model is described under section 3. Implementation details
are given in section 4 followed by results and analysis under section
5. Finally, concluding remarks are given in last section 6.
ICCCT-2017, November 24–26, 2017, Allahabad, India
2 RELATED WORK
Primarily, research on gun detection focuses on Concealed Weapon
Detection (CWD) and knife detection. CWD is stand on some tech-
niques of imaging like infrared imaging, millimeter wave imaging,
in application of luggage control at airports.
In our previous work [11], we have implemented the visual gun
detection system using SIFT(Scale Invariant Feature Transform)
and Harris interest point detector. The proposed system utilized
color based segmentation to take out distinct object from an image
using k-mean clustering algorithm. Harris interest point detector
and Fast Retina Keypoint (FREAK) is utilized to find the weapon in
the segmented images. The object detection challenges like scaling,
rotation, affine and occlusion were addressed in this work. The
dataset was ordered by us with sixty-five positive images (gun
present) and twenty-four negative images (gun is not present). The
dataset was set up such that it comprises of images of various kind
of handheld gun with various scale, revolution and orientation.
In a few images, some of firearm was blocked by either hand or
some other protest and some images comprises multiple weapons.
In a few pictures, some different items are additionally present
other than firearm with different background. The overall accuracy
achieved by us using proposed system was 84.26%.
Followed by work [11], we have implemented gun detection
system Speeded up robust features (SURF) interest point detector
[12]. The Color based segmentation was utilized to take out random
color or objects that are not of interest. At that point SURF features
were utilized to measure similarity of each segmented object with
the weapon descriptor. An object is marked as gun if half of the
features of weapon descriptor are matched with the SURF features
of object. The accuracy achieved using SURF descriptor was 88.67%.
Halima, N.B. et al.[3] demonstrated that BoWSS (Bag of Words
Surveillance System) algorithm has a high potential to detect guns.
They first extract features using SIFT, cluster the obtained functions
using K-Means clustering and use SVM (Support Vector Machine)
for the training.
Sheen et al.[9] proposed a method of CWD, based on three dimen-
sional millimeter (mm) wave imaging technique, to detect concealed
weapon in the body at airports and other secure location. By using
2-D millimeter wave imaging, they modeled a 3-D image for the
target. 3-D image from gathered data of 2-D image can be formed
from three dimensional imaging systems or wide wand imaging.
Z. Xue et al.[17] proposed a method of CWD, which is based
on multi scale decomposition based fusion method. This method
associates the integration of color visual image andinfrared (IR)
imaging. For maintaining the natural color of the actual image,
integration method for visual image and infrared image is done.
R. Blum et al.[4] proposed a method of CWD, which is based on
integration of visual image and IR or mm wave image and it uses the
multi resolution mosaic technique. They have used image mosaic
to highlight the concealed weapon of the target image. To construct
that composite image, which havemicroscopic seam, image mosaic
method is used to combine two or more images.Cut and paste
process is resembled by image mosaic process. A multi resolution
algorithm is used here, which is proposed by Simoncelli et al. [10],
for recognizable image, to construct the steerable pyramid.
G. K. Verma et al.
E. M. Upadhyayet al. [13] proposed a method of CWD, which uses
image fusion. They used the fusion of IR image and visual to detect
concealed weapon in a situation where over exposed and under
exposed area in image of scene are present. Their methodology
consists of applying a homomorphic filter to visual and IR images,
captured at different exposure condition.
Glowacz et al. [5] proposed a method for recognizable knives
detection for the baggage scanning system at airports and railway
stations. Their method is stand on active appearance model and
Harris corner detector.
3 METHODOLOGY
3.1 Database
We have implemented and evaluated our system over Internet
Movie Firearms Database IMFDB, a benchmark database of firearms
[1].
Internet Movie Firearms Database (IMFDb)
The IMFDb is an online database of firearms used or featured
in movies, television shows, video games, and anime. The firearms
images are compiled from hollywood movies, television shows,
video games and Japanese animation. Following firearms are in-
cluded under gun category- Assault Rifle, Battle Rifle, Bullpup, Car-
bine, Flamethrower, Flare Gun, Fictional Firearm, Grenade, Grenade
Launcher, Machine Guns, Machine Pistol, Mine, Missile Launcher,
Mortar, Pisol, Revolver, Rifle, Shotgun, Sniper Rifle, Submachine
Gun, Underwater Firearm etc.
Although, several number of gun categories are available in
IMFDb, we have compiled only Revolver, Rifle, Shotgun. Figure 1
shows sample positive images of IMFDb database. The negative im-
ages are collected from internet randomly from different categories
like flowers, landscape, animals etc.
3.2 Deep Learning Model
We have implemented CNN using MatConvNet [14], a MATLAB
toolbox implementing state-of-the-art Convolutional Neural Net-
works (CNNs) without Graphical Processing Unit(GPU) for com-
puter vision applications. In this study we have used a VGG-16
based classification model pre-trained on the Image Net dataset (ap-
proximately 1.28 million images across 1,000 generic object classes).
VGG Net comes with two version VGG-16 and VGG-19. The archi-
tecture of VGG-16 involves 16 convolutional layers with millions
of parameters. The output of the model is a combination of a linear
layer, which has activation function, named as ’Softmax”, and three
fully connected layers. In a fully connected layer, VGG-16 utilizes
dropout regularization and then RELU activation is implemented to
all convolutional layers. Deep CNNs, such as VGG-16, are generally
trained based on the prediction loss minimization.
Let x and y be the input images and corresponding output class
labels, the objective of the training is to iteratively minimize the
average loss defined as equation 1.
N
1 Õ
J (w) = Ł (f (w, x i ) , yi ) + λR(w) (1)
N i=1
A Handheld Gun Detection using Faster R-CNN Deep Learning
(a) positive
(b) negative
Figure 1: Sample images from IMFDB database (a) positive
and (b) negative samples
where N is the number of data instances (mini-batch) in every
iteration, L is the loss function, f is the predicted output of the
network depending on the current weights w, and R is the weight
decay with the Lagrange multiplierλ.
We use the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD), which is com-
monly used in deep CNNs to update the weights and given with
the equation 2.
Wt +1 = µw t − α ∆J (w t ) (2)
where µ is the momentum weight for the current weights wt
and α is the learning rate.
The network weights are randomly initialized if the network is
trained from scratch and are initially set to a pre-trained network
weights if fine-tuning the deep model. In this work we have used
fine-tuning VGG-16 and initialized it with the weights of the same
architecture. VGG-16 pre-trained on Image net database. The pre-
trained VGG-16 model used in this study is obtained through the
MatConvNet; a deep learning software for MatLab.
4 EXPERIMENTAL SETUP
4.1 Implementation Details
We have adopted MatConvNet framework [15] to implement faster
convolutional neural network. A Very Deep VGG-16 model with
ICCCT-2017, November 24–26, 2017, Allahabad, India
customized layers have been used for implementation of the system.
As the whole system was implemented on a single CPU, training
time is a big issue. To handle this problem, we have used ImageNet
[8] pre-trained model to train our system. Then, the trained model
is fine tuned with the databse. A very deep VGG-16 architecture is
being explained in under section 4.2
4.2 Architecture: Very Deep VGG-16/10
During training, the only preprocessing step is to abstract that mean
value of RBG, which is computed on the training data. After that,
the image is moved along the stack of convolutional layers whose
filters have a very compact field: 3 × 3, which have a convolutional
stalk of 1 pixel. By using, five max-pooling layers (which pursue a
bit of convolutional layers), spatial pooling can be achieved. With
the help of two strides, max-pooling can be performed on a 2 × 2
pixel window. Three fully connected layers follow the stack of
those convolutional layers, which have varied depth in varied ar-
chitectures. Soft-max is the final layer and with the rectification
non-linearity, the entire hidden layer can be provisioned.
4.3 Classification
Training
With the help of mini-batch gradient descent with momentum,
training can be performed by modifying the multinomial logistic
regression objective. In spite of the larger number of parameters
and the greater depth of the introduced nets is taken and to connect
these, some epochs are required by the nets, due to the following
purpose: (a) indirect regularization, inflicted by smaller convolu-
tional filter sizes and greater depth (b) use pre-initialization for
definite layers. The ConvNets input is a fixed size 224 × 224 RGB
image during the Training.
To obtain this fixed-size image, rescaling has been done while
training. Two approaches for setting the training scale S (Let S be
the compact side of an isotropically resized training image) are
considered: 1) single-scale training, that requires a fixed S. 2) multi-
scale training, where every training image is independently resized
by arbitrarily sampling S from a definite range [Smin, Smax].
To improve overall training speed of each model, the researchers
introduced parallelization to the mini batch gradient descent pro-
cess. Since the model is very deep, training on a single GPU would
take months to finish. To speed up the process, the researchers
trained separate batches of images, on each GPU in parallel, to
calculate the gradients.
Testing At test time, in order to classify the input image: Firstly,
it is isotropically resized to that shortest image side, which is pre-
defined and symbolized as Q. After that, the network is impenetra-
bly employed across the resized test image in such a way that, firstly
the fully connected layers are transformed to the convolutional lay-
ers (first fully connected layer to7 × 7 convolutional layer, the last
two Fully Connected convolutional layers to 1 × 1 convolutional
layers)
4.4 Performance Evaluation
For evaluating the performance of our system, specially three met-
ric are used and they are True Positive (TP), False Positive(FP)
and accuracy. True Positive Rate (TPR): It is the determination of
ICCCT-2017, November 24–26, 2017, Allahabad, India G. K. Verma et al.

percentage of those actual positive images, which are accurately

perceived by the system [17] and expressed by equation (3). It is
also known as sensitivity or recall in machine learning. (FN: False
Negative)

T PR = T P/T P + F N (3)
False Positive Rate: It is the determination of percentage of those
negative images, which are wrongly perceived by the system [17].
It is also known as specificity in machine learning.
Accuracy: It is the determination of proportion of those total
numbers of images which are accurately detected by the system.

5 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

The performance of the system is tested against varying condi-
tions such as varied background with guns, occlusion, etc. The
performance of the system is evaluated in terms of accuracy, True (a)

Positive Rate (TPR), False Positive Rate (FPR), Positive Prediction

Value (PPV) and False Detection Rate (FDR).
We found that CNN method works well with the interclass vari-
ation and intra class similarities. The system works well for dif-
ferent conditions like occlusion, interclass variation and gun in
variant background. We have used three different classifiers namely
Support Vector Machine (SVM), K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) and
Ensemble tree for classification and the results are shown in table
1-3 respectively. We have used different values of parameters for
evaluating our system; these different values are used for cross
validation. The best set of parameter values are considered optimal
for visual handheld gun detection. It is concluded that, SVM outper-
form compate to other classifiers with classification accuracy 92.6%
. The overall performance of the system canal can be evaluated in
terms of ROC curves. Receivers operating characteristics (ROC)
curves are an evaluation measure for binary classifier. It shows
the tradeoff between specificity and sensitivity. A performance (b)
graph in terms of ROC and AUC Curve for (a) SVM (b) KNN and
(c) Ensemble Tree are shown in figure 2 with maximum accuracy
value. We have also compared our results with existing studies. A
comparative performance with existing work is given in table 4.

Table 1: Classification accuracy for SVM

Algorithm Accuracy TPR FPR PPV FDR

Linear SVM 89.9 87 6 95 5
Quadratic SVM 88.3 88 11 91 9
Cubic 84.6 88 19 85 15
Fine Gaussian 92.6 87 0 100 0
Medium Gaussian 92.0 86 0 100 0
Coarse gaussian 92.0 86 0 100 0

(c)
6 CONCLUSION
In this proposed paper we propounded and implemented a novel Figure 2: Performance graph in terms of ROC and AUC
handheld gun detection approach for surveillance and alert system. Curve for (a) SVM (b) KNN and (c) Ensemble Tree
The system includes CNN based VGG-16 architecture as feature
extractor, followed by state-of-the-art classifiers implemented on a
standard gun database. With 93% accuracy, the utmost auspicious
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