Streaming Video Crime Anticipation with Spatio-Temporal Causal Reasoning

Crime anticipation enables proactive public safety interventions, yet existing video security systems remain largely reactive, unable to detect precursors of crime. While current visual language models (VLM)-based video understanding methods show promise in high-level reasoning, they are not designed to explicitly model the spatio-temporal causal relationships essential for anticipating crimes. We address this limitation by two causal-driven components. First, we develop the Spatio-Temporal Causal Reasoning Crime (STCRC) dataset, a hierarchical dataset comprising 73K samples across five progressive causal reasoning tasks, facilitating criminal precursors learning. Second, we propose the Spatio-Temporal Causal Hypergraph (STCH), a streaming module that transforms implicit entity dynamics into explicit causal structures to enhance causal reasoning for crime in VLMs. By combining these two components, our framework advances real-time crime anticipation, achieving improvements in anticipatory tasks: a 70.7% relative improvement in crime classification, a 10.1% in crime detection, and a 3.7% reduction in temporal prediction error.