BodyCam-VQA: Enhanced Body-Worn Camera Video Captioning via Multimodal Reasoning and Probe Question Generation

Karish Gupta, Matthew Alex, Alex Li, Yang Wu, Yun-Wei Chu, Kashif Munir, Xiaotian Zhou, Zhengping Ji, Xiaozhong Liu


Abstract
Police body-worn camera (BWC) footage has emerged as a critical aspect of law enforcement that ensures legal transparency, officer accountability, and the protection of civil rights. However, effectively processing this data remains a significant challenge due to its multimodal video format. BWC videos, in many cases, comprise chaotic scenes with low visual quality, rapid movement/interactions, and high-noise audio that make visual understanding a challenge for even SOTA multimodal models. Current Vision-Language Models (VLMs) frequently overlook critical forensic details, such as the presence of valuable evidence or the latent nuances of suspect-officer interactions, which are vital for fair legal outcomes and civilian/officer safety. To address these limitations, we propose an Adaptive Visual Question Answering (VQA) framework engineered for high-stakes law enforcement. Our framework employs a structured reasoning approach to extract fine-grained visual evidence that traditional captioning systems fail to capture. We experiment with multiple question generation models, including foundation models and fine-tuned open-weight models, to observe performance variation among question generation model implementations. Our results demonstrate that this VQA-driven architecture provides a more reliable, objective, and detailed record of enforcement events, ultimately serving as a powerful tool to protect both law enforcement officers and the public through AI-assisted forensic clarity.
Anthology ID:
2026.nlp4pi-1.10
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact (NLP4PI)
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Katherine Atwell, Angana Borah, Daryna Dementieva, Elisa Kreiss, Neema Kotonya, Jiarui Liu, Liz Olson, Ruyuan Wan, Jieyu Zhao
Venues:
NLP4PI | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
103–115
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.nlp4pi-1.10/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Karish Gupta, Matthew Alex, Alex Li, Yang Wu, Yun-Wei Chu, Kashif Munir, Xiaotian Zhou, Zhengping Ji, and Xiaozhong Liu. 2026. BodyCam-VQA: Enhanced Body-Worn Camera Video Captioning via Multimodal Reasoning and Probe Question Generation. In Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact (NLP4PI), pages 103–115, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
BodyCam-VQA: Enhanced Body-Worn Camera Video Captioning via Multimodal Reasoning and Probe Question Generation (Gupta et al., NLP4PI 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.nlp4pi-1.10.pdf