The Visual Social Distancing Problem

One of the main and most effective measures to contain the recent viral outbreak is the maintenance of the so-called Social Distancing (SD). To comply with this constraint, workplaces, public institutions, transports and schools will likely adopt restrictions over the minimum inter-personal distance between people. Given this actual scenario, it is crucial to massively measure the compliance to such physical constraint in our life, in order to figure out the reasons of the possible breaks of such distance limitations, and understand if this implies a possible threat given the scene context. All of this, complying with privacy policies and making the measurement acceptable. To this end, we introduce the Visual Social Distancing (VSD) problem, defined as the automatic estimation of the inter-personal distance from an image, and the characterization of the related people aggregations. VSD is pivotal for a non-invasive analysis to whether people comply with the SD restriction, and to provide statistics about the level of safety of specific areas whenever this constraint is violated. We then discuss how VSD relates with previous literature in Social Signal Processing and indicate which existing Computer Vision methods can be used to manage such problem. We conclude with future challenges related to the effectiveness of VSD systems, ethical implications and future application scenarios.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures. All the authors equally contributed to this manuscript and they are listed by alphabetical order. Under submissio

An effective video processing pipeline for crowd pattern analysis

With the purpose of automatic detection of crowd patterns including abrupt and abnormal changes, a novel approach for extracting motion “textures” from dynamic Spatio-Temporal Volume (STV) blocks formulated by live video streams has been proposed. This paper starts from introducing the common approach for STV construction and corresponding Spatio-Temporal Texture (STT) extraction techniques. Next the crowd motion information contained within the random STT slices are evaluated based on the information entropy theory to cull the static background and noises occupying most of the STV spaces. A preprocessing step using Gabor filtering for improving the STT sampling efficiency and motion fidelity has been devised and tested. The technique has been applied on benchmarking video databases for proof-of-concept and performance evaluation. Preliminary results have shown encouraging outcomes and promising potentials for its real-world crowd monitoring and control applications

Effective crowd anomaly detection through spatio-temporal texture analysis

Abnormal crowd behaviors in high density situations can pose great danger to public safety. Despite the extensive installation of closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras, it is still difficult to achieve real-time alerts and automated responses from current systems. Two major breakthroughs have been reported in this research. Firstly, a spatial-temporal texture extraction algorithm is developed. This algorithm is able to effectively extract video textures with abundant crowd motion details. It is through adopting Gabor-filtered textures with the highest information entropy values. Secondly, a novel scheme for defining crowd motion patterns (signatures) is devised to identify abnormal behaviors in the crowd by employing an enhanced gray level co-occurrence matrix model. In the experiments, various classic classifiers are utilized to benchmark the performance of the proposed method. The results obtained exhibit detection and accuracy rates which are, overall, superior to other techniques

Crowd Behavior Understanding through SIOF Feature Analysis

Realizing the automated and online detection of crowd anomalies from surveillance CCTVs is a research-intensive and application-demanding task. This research proposes a novel technique for detecting crowd abnormalities through analyzing the spatial and temporal features of the input video signals. This integrated solution defines an image descriptor that reflects the global motion information over time. A non-linear SVM has then been adopted to classify dominant or large-scale crow d abnormal behaviors. The work reported has focused on: 1) online (or near real-time) detection of moving objects through a background subtraction model, namely ViBe; and to identify the saliency information as a spatial feature in addition to the optical flow of the motion foreground as the temporal feature; 2) to combine the extracted spatial and temporal features into a novel SIOF descriptor that encapsulates the global movement characteristic of a crowd; 3) the optimization of a nonlinear support vector machine (SVM) as classifier to detect suspicious crowd behaviors. The test and evaluation of the devised models and techniques have selected the BEHAVE database as the primary experimental data sets. Results against benchmarking models and systems have shown promising advancements in terms of the accuracy and efficiency for detecting crowd anomalies

Extracting Spatio-temporal Texture Signatures for Crowd Abnormality Detection

In order to achieve automatic prediction and warning of hazardous crowd behaviors, a Spatio-Temporal Volume (STV) analysis method is proposed in this research to detect crowd abnormality recorded in CCTV streams. The method starts from building STV models using video data. STV slices – called Spatio-Temporal Textures (STT) - can then be analyzed to detect crowded regions. After calculating the Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) among those regions, abnormal crowd behavior can be identified, including panic behaviors and other behavioral patterns. In this research, the proposed STT signatures have been defined and experimented on benchmarking video databases. The proposed algorithm has shown a promising accuracy and efficiency for detecting crowd-based abnormal behaviors. It has been proved that the STT signatures are suitable descriptors for detecting certain crowd events, which provide an encouraging direction for real-time surveillance and video retrieval applications

Socially Constrained Structural Learning for Groups Detection in Crowd

Modern crowd theories agree that collective behavior is the result of the underlying interactions among small groups of individuals. In this work, we propose a novel algorithm for detecting social groups in crowds by means of a Correlation Clustering procedure on people trajectories. The affinity between crowd members is learned through an online formulation of the Structural SVM framework and a set of specifically designed features characterizing both their physical and social identity, inspired by Proxemic theory, Granger causality, DTW and Heat-maps. To adhere to sociological observations, we introduce a loss function (G-MITRE) able to deal with the complexity of evaluating group detection performances. We show our algorithm achieves state-of-the-art results when relying on both ground truth trajectories and tracklets previously extracted by available detector/tracker systems

Advancements In Crowd-Monitoring System: A Comprehensive Analysis of Systematic Approaches and Automation Algorithms: State-of-The-Art

Growing apprehensions surrounding public safety have captured the attention of numerous governments and security agencies across the globe. These entities are increasingly acknowledging the imperative need for reliable and secure crowd-monitoring systems to address these concerns. Effectively managing human gatherings necessitates proactive measures to prevent unforeseen events or complications, ensuring a safe and well-coordinated environment. The scarcity of research focusing on crowd monitoring systems and their security implications has given rise to a burgeoning area of investigation, exploring potential approaches to safeguard human congregations effectively. Crowd monitoring systems depend on a bifurcated approach, encompassing vision-based and non-vision-based technologies. An in-depth analysis of these two methodologies will be conducted in this research. The efficacy of these approaches is contingent upon the specific environment and temporal context in which they are deployed, as they each offer distinct advantages. This paper endeavors to present an in-depth analysis of the recent incorporation of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms and models into automated systems, emphasizing their contemporary applications and effectiveness in various contexts

Towards Intelligent Crowd Behavior Understanding through the STFD Descriptor Exploration

Realizing the automated and online detection of crowd anomalies from surveillance CCTVs is a research-intensive and application-demanding task. This research proposes a novel technique for detecting crowd abnormalities through analyzing the spatial and temporal features of input video signals. This integrated solution defines an image descriptor (named spatio-temporal feature descriptor - STFD) that reflects the global motion information of crowds over time. A CNN has then been adopted to classify dominant or large-scale crowd abnormal behaviors. The work reported has focused on: 1) detecting moving objects in online (or near real-time) manner through spatio-temporal segmentations of crowds that is defined by the similarity of group trajectory structures in temporal space and the foreground blocks based on Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) in spatial space; 2) dividing multiple clustered groups based on the spectral clustering method by considering image pixels from spatio-temporal segmentation regions as dynamic particles; 3) generating the STFD descriptor instances by calculating the attributes (i.e., collectiveness, stability, conflict and crowd density) of particles in the corresponding groups; 4) inputting generated STFD descriptor instances into the devised convolutional neural network (CNN) to detect suspicious crowd behaviors. The test and evaluation of the devised models and techniques have selected the PETS database as the primary experimental data sets. Results against benchmarking models and systems have shown promising advancements of this novel approach in terms of accuracy and efficiency for detecting crowd anomalies