Although the traits emerged in a mass gathering are often non-deliberative, the act of mass impulse may lead to irrevocable crowd disasters. The two-fold increase of carnage in crowd since the past two decades has spurred significant advances in the field of computer vision, towards effective and proactive crowd surveillance. Computer vision studies related to crowd are observed to resonate with the understanding of the emergent behavior in physics (complex systems) and biology (animal swarm). These studies, which are inspired by biology and physics, share surprisingly common insights, and interesting contradictions. However, this aspect of discussion has not been fully explored. Therefore, this survey provides the readers with a review of the state-of-the-art methods in crowd behavior analysis from the physics and biologically inspired perspectives. We provide insights and comprehensive discussions for a broader understanding of the underlying prospect of blending physics and biology studies in computer vision.
It is common for CCTV operators to overlook interesting events taking place within the crowd due to large number of people in the crowded scene (i.e. marathon, rally). Thus, there is a dire need to automate the detection of salient crowd regions acquiring immediate attention for a more effective and proactive surveillance. This paper proposes a novel framework to identify and localize salient regions in a crowd scene, by transforming low-level features extracted from crowd motion field into a global similarity structure. The global similarity structure representation allows the discovery of the intrinsic manifold of the motion dynamics, which could not be captured by the low-level representation. Ranking is then performed on the global similarity structure to identify a set of extrema. The proposed approach is unsupervised so learning stage is eliminated. Experimental results on public datasets demonstrates the effectiveness of exploiting such extrema in identifying salient regions in various crowd scenarios that exhibit crowding, local irregular motion, and unique motion areas such as sources and sinks.
Conventional tracking solutions are not feasible in handling abrupt motion as they are based on smooth motion assumption or an accurate motion model. Abrupt motion is not subject to motion continuity and smoothness. To assuage this, we deem tracking as an optimisation problem and propose a novel abrupt motion tracker that based on swarm intelligence -the SwaTrack. Unlike existing swarm-based filtering methods, we first of all introduce an optimised swarm-based sampling strategy to tradeoff between the exploration and exploitation of the search space in search for the optimal proposal distribution. Secondly, we propose Dynamic Acceleration Parameters (DAP) allow on the fly tuning of the best mean and variance of the distribution for sampling. Such innovating idea of combining these strategies in an ingenious way in the PSO framework to handle the abrupt motion, which so far no existing works are found. Experimental results in both quantitative and qualitative had shown the effectiveness of the proposed method in tracking abrupt motions.
The increasing number of cameras and a handful of human operators to monitor the video inputs from hundreds of cameras leave the system ill equipped to fulfil the task of detecting anomalies. Thus, there is a dire need to automatically detect the regions that require immediate attention for more effective and proactive surveillance. A framework that utilises the temporal variations in the flow field of a crowd scene to automatically detect salient regions is proposed, while eliminating the need to have prior knowledge of the scene or training. The flow fields are deemed to be a dynamic system and adopt the stability theory of dynamic systems, to determine the motion dynamics within a given area. In this context, the salient regions refer to the areas with high motion dynamics, where the points in a particular region are unstable. The experimental results on public, crowd scenes have shown the effectiveness of the proposed method in detecting salient regions which correspond to an unstable flow, occlusions, bottlenecks, and entries and exits.
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