Abstract
High-fidelity pedestrian tracking in real-life conditions has been an important tool in fundamental crowd dynamics research allowing to quantify statistics of relevant observables including walking velocities, mutual distances and body orientations. As this technology advances, it is becoming increasingly useful also in society. In fact, continued urbanization is overwhelming existing pedestrian infrastructures such as transportation hubs and stations, generating an urgent need for real-time highly-accurate usage data, aiming both at flow monitoring and dynamics understanding. To successfully employ pedestrian tracking techniques in research and technology, it is crucial to validate and benchmark them for accuracy. This is not only necessary to guarantee data quality, but also to identify systematic errors. Currently, there is no established policy in this context. In this contribution, we present and discuss a benchmark suite, towards an open standard in the community, for privacy-respectful pedestrian tracking techniques. The suite is technology-independent and it is applicable to academic and commercial pedestrian tracking systems, operating both in lab environments and real-life conditions. The benchmark suite consists of 5 tests addressing specific aspects of pedestrian tracking quality, including accurate line-based crowd flux estimation, local density estimation, individual position detection and trajectory accuracy. The output of the tests are quality factors expressed as single numbers. We provide the benchmark results for two tracking systems, both operating in real-life, one commercial, and the other based on overhead depth-maps developed at TU Eindhoven, within the Crowdflow topical group. We discuss the results on the basis of the quality factors and report on the typical sensor and algorithmic performance. This enables us to highlight the current state-of-the-art, its limitations and provide installation recommendations, with specific attention to multi-sensor setups and data stitching.
Highlights
To successfully employ pedestrian tracking techniques in research and technology, it is crucial to measure the level of performance and asses the quality of the output data
We present the benchmark results for two pedestrian tracking setups operating in reallife, one developed in-house at TU Eindhoven, and the other one commercially available
We give a description of the pedestrian tracking systems in the paragraphs below
Summary
Growing population and continued urbanization puts urban infrastructures at large stress. To unlock sustainable and scalable crowd management, maximizing comfort and safety, real-time, high-accuracy, anonymous individual pedestrian tracking is a must. This enables reliable usage monitoring and performance profiling, and, on a broader perspective, the possibility to develop a fundamental understanding of the motion of crowd flows. To successfully employ pedestrian tracking techniques in research and technology, it is crucial to measure the level of performance and asses the quality of the output data This means establishing a benchmark as well as measuring the performance of the current state-of-the-art. To the best of our knowledge, there is no established tool in this context In this contribution we propose a benchmark that consists of a minimal set of five tests to quantify pedestrian detection accuracy and time-tracking reliability.
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