9,264 research outputs found
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
How simple rules determine pedestrian behavior and crowd disasters
With the increasing size and frequency of mass events, the study of crowd
disasters and the simulation of pedestrian flows have become important research
areas. Yet, even successful modeling approaches such as those inspired by
Newtonian force models are still not fully consistent with empirical
observations and are sometimes hard to calibrate. Here, a novel cognitive
science approach is proposed, which is based on behavioral heuristics. We
suggest that, guided by visual information, namely the distance of obstructions
in candidate lines of sight, pedestrians apply two simple cognitive procedures
to adapt their walking speeds and directions. While simpler than previous
approaches, this model predicts individual trajectories and collective patterns
of motion in good quantitative agreement with a large variety of empirical and
experimental data. This includes the emergence of self-organization phenomena,
such as the spontaneous formation of unidirectional lanes or stop-and-go waves.
Moreover, the combination of pedestrian heuristics with body collisions
generates crowd turbulence at extreme densities-a phenomenon that has been
observed during recent crowd disasters. By proposing an integrated treatment of
simultaneous interactions between multiple individuals, our approach overcomes
limitations of current physics-inspired pair interaction models. Understanding
crowd dynamics through cognitive heuristics is therefore not only crucial for a
better preparation of safe mass events. It also clears the way for a more
realistic modeling of collective social behaviors, in particular of human
crowds and biological swarms. Furthermore, our behavioral heuristics may serve
to improve the navigation of autonomous robots.Comment: Article accepted for publication in PNA
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