# Self-supervised visual learning for analyzing firearms trafficking activities on the Web Source: [Self-supervised visual learning for analyzing firearms trafficking activities on the Web]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2025-10-26T02:17:23.201Z Authors: Sotirios Konstantakos, Despina Ioanna Chalkiadaki, Ioannis Mademlis, Adamantia Anna Rebolledo Chrysochoou, Georgios Th. Papadopoulos Published: 2023-10-12T01:47:55.000Z ## Abstract Automated visual firearms classification from RGB images is an important real-world task with applications in public space security, intelligence gathering and law enforcement investigations. When applied to images massively crawled from the World Wide Web (including social media and dark Web sites), it can serve as an important component of systems that attempt to identify criminal firearms trafficking networks, by analyzing Big Data from open-source intelligence. Deep Neural Networks (DNN) are the state-of-the-art methodology for achieving this, with Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) being typically employed. The common transfer learning approach consists of pretraining on a large-scale, generic annotated dataset for whole-image classification, such as ImageNet-1k, and then finetuning the DNN on a smaller, annotated, task-specific, downstream dataset for visual firearms classification. Neither Visual Transformer (ViT) neural architectures nor Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) approaches have been so far evaluated on this critical task.. ## Recorded benchmark results A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage. ## Original sources and implementation [Original paper]() [PDF]()