2023/12/26 by Zexu Li, Lei Fang, Li, Zexu +1
Computer Science · Engineering · #Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems (nlin.AO) #Anomaly Detection Techniques and Applications #Evacuation and Crowd Dynamics #FOS: Physical sciences #Video Surveillance and Tracking Methods
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2312.16328
openalex publication_date 2023/12/26 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Human crowds exhibit a wide range of interesting patterns, and measuring them is of great interest in areas ranging from psychology and social science to civil engineering. While in situ measurements of human crowd patterns require large amounts of time and labor to obtain, human crowd experiments may result in statistics different from those that would emerge with a naturally emerging crowd. Here we present a simple, broadly applicable, highly accurate human crowd tracking technique to extract high-fidelity kinematic information from widely available surveillance camera videos. With the proposed technique, researchers can access scientific crowd data on a scale that is orders of magnitude larger than before. In addition to being able to measure an individual's time-resolved position and velocity, our technique also offers high validity time-resolved acceleration and step frequency, and step length. We demonstrate the applicability of our technique by applying it to surveillance camera videos in Tokyo Shinjuku streamed on YouTube and exploiting its high fidelity to expose the hidden contribution of walking speed variance at the crossroad. The high fidelity and simplicity of this powerful technique open up the way to utilize the large volume of existing surveillance camera data around the world for scientific studies.