Towards an integrated approach to crowd analysis and crowd synthesis: A case study and first results

Abstract

Studies related to crowds of pedestrians, both those of theoretical nature and application oriented ones, have generally focused on either the analysis or the synthesis of the phenomena related to the interplay between individual pedestrians, each characterised by goals, preferences and potentially relevant relationships with others, and the environment in which they are situated. The cases in which these activities have been systematically integrated for a mutual benefit are still very few compared to the corpus of crowd related literature. This paper presents a case study of an integrated approach to the definition of an innovative model for pedestrian and crowd simulation (on the side of synthesis) that was actually motivated and supported by the analyses of empirical data acquired from both experimental settings and observations in real world scenarios. In particular, we will introduce a model for the adaptive behaviour of pedestrians that are also members of groups, that strive to maintain their cohesion even in difficult (e.g. high density) situations. The paper will show how the synthesis phase also provided inputs to the analysis of empirical data, in a virtuous circle.

Age and Group-driven Pedestrian Behaviour: from Observations to Simulations

“…The methodology is based on the integration between data collection techniques focused on locomotion behaviour (analysis) and the power of computer-based pedestrian simulations (synthesis) [17]. The results obtained from the observation of pedestrian behaviour give the basis for the validation of computer-based simulation systems, testing the adherence of the simulation results on realistic behavioural dynamics.…”

Advances in Crowd Analysis for Urban Applications Through Urban Event Detection

“…Used mainly for crowd tracking and crowd behavior analysis [18], [20], [58], [59], [60], the video data has also been employed in, understanding traffic flow [81], [82], and crowd density estimation and crowd event detection [35].…”

“…The main focus of these articles were the methods that describe detection of crowd dynamics provided by crowd data. These dynamics generally consist of crowd count [6], [7], [11], [13], [49], [50], [17], [51], [52], crowd trajectories/mobility [32], [53], [9], [14], [54], crowd sentiment [21], and crowd behavior [18], [20], [55], [56], [57], [58], [51], [59], [60]. These articles clearly showed an increasing trend in the crowd event detection research for UA (see Figure 1C).…”

An agent-based model of pedestrian dynamics considering groups: A real world case study

“…1. From the left: an overview of the Vittorio Emanuele II gallery, the flow of pedestrians within the walkway and a snapshot of the recorded video images with the superimposed grid for data analysis observation and subsequent manual analysis of the acquired video footage, that however are more extensively described in [11], but we are going to focus on the results related to the influence of groups on the overall pedestrian dynamics. It is however necessary to clarify that the manual analysis of the video considered a square portion of the walkway 12.8 meters wide and 12.8 meters long (163.84 square meters).…”