Anomalous Weapon Detection for Armed Robbery Using Yolo V8

Improved surveillance systems provide early warnings and improve public safety. Such systems are desperately needed in light of the rising number of armed robberies in private and public places. A YOLOv8-based system specifically intended for CCTV-based armed robbery detection was developed to meet this demand in this study. The system identified weapons such as handguns, assault weapons, shotguns, and others in real-time, utilizing a custom-trained model. The system demonstrated a strong performance with an overall anomaly detection accuracy of 87.50%. The confidence level was 1.2 m (58.79) and 2 m (59.74) in determining the optimal height and distance considering the positioning of the CCTV camera. The low confidence level was attributed to the mixture of images from a general database from the Internet along with self-captured images that resulted in the overfitting of the datasets. Although improvements are needed to increase the confidence level by using real guns in training the model and reducing false negatives, the potential of YOLOv8 to enhance public safety has been confirmed by providing early warnings of armed robberies.