Facing Needs and Requirements of Crowd Modelling: Towards a Dedicated Computer Vision Toolset

Abstract

The modelling and simulation of pedestrians and crowd dynamics require empirical evidences and quantitative data describing the relevant phenomena that models must be able to reproduce. Computer vision can provide several tools both to semi-automatically acquire the demand of a given situation and actually configure a simulation model, as well as to gather information for the sake of model calibration and validation. This paper proposes methods supporting the segmentation and pedestrian counting of crowd flows, the identification and characterisation of main flows in an analysed scene and the detection of social groups in an observed population. The methods are briefly introduced and the achieved results are presented and discussed with reference to the current state of the art.