Video-Based Sexual Harassment Detection Using Fine-Tuned Video Transformers

Jubayer- Al- Mahmud, Md Shamimul Islam, Md Nur Hossain

Sexual harassment represents a pervasive societal challenge, with a substantial proportion of incidents remaining unreported due to insufficient evidence and delayed intervention mechanisms. Smart surveillance systems capable of detecting such incidents in real-time could assist law enforcement and serve as a deterrent. However, video-based harassment detection poses significant challenges, including variations in clothing, illumina- tion, partial occlusions, low resolution, and diverse camera view- points. Despite its social importance, this problem has received limited research attention, primarily due to the scarcity of large- scale annotated video datasets. To address this gap, we extend the Sexual Harassment Video (SHV) dataset to 600 short video clips sourced from YouTube and annotated into harassment and non-harassment categories using consistent labeling guidelines. We fine-tune three state-of-the-art video transformer models, VideoMAE, ViViT, and TimeSformer, pretrained on Kinetics- 400, for binary harassment classification. Experimental results show that all three models achieve competitive classification performance, with TimeSformer attaining the highest test accu-…