The automatic detection and tracking of pedestrians under high-density conditions is a challenging task for both computer vision fields and pedestrian flow studies. Collecting pedestrian data is a fundamental task for the modeling and practical implementations of crowd management. Although there are many methods for detecting pedestrians, they may not be easily adopted in the high-density situations. Therefore, we utilized one emerging method based on the deep learning algorithm. Based on the top-view video data of some pedestrian flow experiments recorded by an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), we produce our own training datasets. We train the detection model by using Yolo v3, a very popular deep learning model among many available detection models in recent years. We find the detection results are good; e.g., the precisions, recalls, and F1 scores could be larger than 0.95 even when the pedestrian density is as high as 9.0   ped / m 2 . We think this approach could be used for the other pedestrian flow experiments or field data which have similar configurations and can also be useful for automatic crowd density estimation.

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