IARD: Intruder Activity Recognition Dataset for Threat Detection

Home security and surveillance systems are rapidly evolving, with Artificial Intelligence (AI) playing a transformative role in enhancing safety and threat detection. While several AI methods and datasets for intruder-related risk assessment exist, they predominantly focus on face detection and recognition, leaving a significant gap in addressing high-risk scenarios involving malicious intent, such as theft or harm. The lack of dedicated datasets for recognizing complex intruder activities, such as carrying weapons or engaging in destructive actions like kicking doors or breaking locks, limits the development of robust solutions. This work bridges this gap by introducing the Intruder Activity Recognition Dataset (IARD), a video dataset specifically designed to recognize four critical intruder activities: Armed Intruder, Door Kick, Intruder Inside and Lock Breaking. Leveraging IARD, we thoroughly benchmark various state-of-the-art methods, among which a Vision Transformer is found to achieve an impressive 93.3% accuracy in recognizing intruder actions. Our contribution highlights the potential of IARD in advancing AI-driven surveillance systems, providing a foundational dataset and benchmark for recognizing complex intruder activities.