A Multi-Camera Temporal Fusion for False Alarm Suppression in Edge-Based Weapon Surveillance

Abstract

Real-time weapon detection is a critical component of intelligent surveillance systems, particularly for perimeter monitoring applications on embedded edge platforms. However, reliable alarm generation remains challenging because false positives, temporal instability, and viewpoint inconsistencies can propagate through conventional multi-camera fusion strategies. To address these limitations, this work proposes a lightweight Adaptive Multi-Camera Temporal Fusion (ACTF) framework that combines confidence-aware evidence separation, temporal persistence, and short-window cross-camera validation at the decision level, thereby confirming detections without requiring additional neural-network inference. The framework was evaluated using a TensorRT-optimized YOLO26s detector in controlled dual-camera scenarios involving clear visibility, partial occlusion, visually ambiguous distractors, and challenging illumination. While logical OR fusion achieved higher recall, it also propagated erroneous detections; in contrast, ACTF completely suppressed the distractor-induced false alarms while maintaining competitive performance and sub-second confirmation under favorable conditions. The original NVIDIA Jetson Nano implementation achieved an average throughput of 2.4 camera-pair cycles per second, corresponding to low-rate online embedded operation, whereas an additional NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX benchmark achieved an average of 10.2 camera-pair cycles per second. This is equivalent to 10.2 processed frames per second for each camera stream and 20.4 camera images per second in aggregate. These results support reactive real-time embedded operation on the Xavier NX platform and demonstrate that ACTF improves alarm reliability with negligible decision-level computational overhead.