Visual Timelines of Police Encounters in Body-Worn Camera Footage: Operational Context and Activity Cataloging for Training and Analysis in OpenBWC

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Srbinovska, Angela, Homan, Christopher, Martin, Adrian, Fokoué, Ernest
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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_version_ 1866916020077199360
author Srbinovska, Angela
Homan, Christopher
Martin, Adrian
Fokoué, Ernest
author_facet Srbinovska, Angela
Homan, Christopher
Martin, Adrian
Fokoué, Ernest
contents Law enforcement agencies are accumulating vast amounts of body-worn camera (BWC) footage. However, this remains operationally opaque. That is, analysts and trainers still have to invest considerable time watching full-length videos to pinpoint the start of key encounters and identify the points where activity shifts to something more physically intense. We present an approach to process BWC video into a time-aligned sequence of fixed-length 10-second windows, processed and labeled using a privacy-conscious protocol. Each window is labeled with two dimensions of information: (i) the operational context of the window and (ii) the level of motion intensity within the window, with low-evidence labels for windows for which insufficient evidence exists due to darkness, blur or occlusion. We train models to classify windows based on these two axes using frames sampled from each window encoded using CLIP model and aggregated into a window-level representation. We extract dense optical flow statistics for each window to capture motion intensity. On test windows the best context model achieves 78.75% accuracy, and the best-accuracy activity model achieves 88.33%. We also included integrity audits to show the results and how the visual timeline representations support faster incident review and make the officer training workflow more practical.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_17095
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Visual Timelines of Police Encounters in Body-Worn Camera Footage: Operational Context and Activity Cataloging for Training and Analysis in OpenBWC
Srbinovska, Angela
Homan, Christopher
Martin, Adrian
Fokoué, Ernest
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Law enforcement agencies are accumulating vast amounts of body-worn camera (BWC) footage. However, this remains operationally opaque. That is, analysts and trainers still have to invest considerable time watching full-length videos to pinpoint the start of key encounters and identify the points where activity shifts to something more physically intense. We present an approach to process BWC video into a time-aligned sequence of fixed-length 10-second windows, processed and labeled using a privacy-conscious protocol. Each window is labeled with two dimensions of information: (i) the operational context of the window and (ii) the level of motion intensity within the window, with low-evidence labels for windows for which insufficient evidence exists due to darkness, blur or occlusion. We train models to classify windows based on these two axes using frames sampled from each window encoded using CLIP model and aggregated into a window-level representation. We extract dense optical flow statistics for each window to capture motion intensity. On test windows the best context model achieves 78.75% accuracy, and the best-accuracy activity model achieves 88.33%. We also included integrity audits to show the results and how the visual timeline representations support faster incident review and make the officer training workflow more practical.
title Visual Timelines of Police Encounters in Body-Worn Camera Footage: Operational Context and Activity Cataloging for Training and Analysis in OpenBWC
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.17095