A Novel Integration of Face-Recognition Algorithms with a Soft Voting Scheme for Efficiently Tracking Missing Person in Challenging Large-Gathering Scenarios.

Adnan Nadeem,Muhammad Ashraf,Ali Alzahrani,Kashif Rizwan,Nauman Qadeer,Qammer H Abbasi,Amir Mehmood

doi:10.3390/s22031153

Abstract

The probability of losing vulnerable companions, such as children or older ones, in large gatherings is high, and their tracking is challenging. We proposed a novel integration of face-recognition algorithms with a soft voting scheme, which was applied, on low-resolution cropped images of detected faces, in order to locate missing persons in a challenging large-crowd gathering. We considered the large-crowd gathering scenarios at Al Nabvi mosque Madinah. It is a highly uncontrolled environment with a low-resolution-images data set gathered from moving cameras. The proposed model first performs real-time face-detection from camera-captured images, and then it uses the missing person’s profile face image and applies well-known face-recognition algorithms for personal identification, and their predictions are further combined to obtain more mature prediction. The presence of a missing person is determined by a small set of consecutive frames. The novelty of this work lies in using several recognition algorithms in parallel and combining their predictions by a unique soft-voting scheme, which in return not only provides a mature prediction with spatio-temporal values but also mitigates the false results of individual recognition algorithms. The experimental results of our model showed reasonably good accuracy of missing person’s identification in an extremely challenging large-gathering scenario.

Highlights

We present our proposed methodology by first illustrating the coverage of Al Nabvi mosque with twenty cameras with geofences
We established a dataset of 188 personals, including children, youngsters, and elderly individuals from existing infrastructure in Al Nabvi mosque
We established a dataset of images in a large-gathering scenario of Al Nabvi mosque using the existing infrastructure

Summary

Introduction

Several events are held each year, around the world, where a huge crowd gathers for some purpose like entertainment or performing religious rituals. It is common practice that some people, especially children and older persons, get separated from their companions in such large-gathering scenarios. Tracking such missing persons efficiently is still a large research problem. The work in hand is an attempt to improve the efficiency of tracking missing persons in large-gathering scenarios of Al Nabvi mosque, Madinah, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), where millions of Muslim pilgrims gather every year to perform religious activities. By applying facial-detection and -recognition algorithms efficiently, becomes extremely challenging in large-crowd-gathering scenarios. Major challenges are uncontrolled environments, densely populated regions, and varying quality

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Conclusion