DVD

Example frames and videos from the DVD database, showcasing diverse scenes, environments, participants and camera types.

Abstract

Automated violence detection is an increasingly important research area, with applications in public safety, intelligent surveillance and real-world video understanding. However, progress in this field has been constrained by the limited availability of large-scale, diverse and comprehensively annotated databases. Existing violence detection databases often suffer from coarse video-level annotations, limited diversity of environments and recording conditions, short video durations, insufficient representation of challenging real-world scenarios and a lack of contextual metadata.

To address these limitations, we introduce DVD (Diverse Video Violence Database), a large-scale database comprising 500 videos and approximately 2.7 million frames, annotated at the frame level for violence detection. DVD captures a broad range of real-world violent and non-violent events across diverse environments, lighting conditions, camera types, participant characteristics and social interactions.

Unlike existing databases that predominantly rely on video-level labels, DVD provides fine-grained temporal annotations, enabling the identification and localisation of violent events within longer videos. Additionally, it includes rich metadata describing the nature of events, the number of participants, recording conditions, environmental characteristics and contextual information.

DVD is designed to support the development and evaluation of robust, generalisable and context-aware violence detection models under realistic conditions.

How to acquire DVD

Academics

If you are an academic holding a permanent, continuing, tenure-track or equivalent independent academic appointment at a university (e.g., Assistant Professor, Associate Professor or Full Professor), you must:

i) complete and sign the Academic Research EULA;
ii) use your official university e-mail address (the data cannot be released to personal e-mail addresses);
iii) send an e-mail to d.kollias@qmul.ac.uk with the subject: DVD request by academic;
iv) attach the signed EULA and include a brief explanation of why you require access to the DVD database and a link to your official university webpage.

Postdoctoral researchers and PhD students

Postdoctoral researchers and PhD students cannot apply as the Lead Researcher under the Academic Research EULA.
If you are a postdoctoral researcher or PhD student, your academic supervisor must apply using the Academic Research EULA following the procedure above and provide you with access as a Permitted Researcher.

Industry and research organisations

If you are from a company, commercial organisation, standalone research institute, research centre, laboratory, governmental body, or other non-university organisation and wish to acquire DVD, please send an e-mail from your official organisational e-mail address to d.kollias@qmul.ac.uk with the subject: DVD request from industry/research organisation. Please explain:

i) the organisation and research group/team requesting access;
ii) why access to DVD is required; and
iii) whether the intended use is research-only or commercial.

Processing Time:
Due to the high volume of requests, please allow about 7 days for the reply to your request for access.

Important Information

All the videos of the database are obtained from media (e.g., Youtube). We are not responsible for the content nor the meaning of these images.

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