Chapter 1 - The Group and Crowd Analysis Interdisciplinary Challenge

Abstract

This book highlights the study of groups of people as the primary focus of research in conjunction with crowds. Crowds are formed primarily by groups, and not only by single individuals, so the focus on groups is beneficial to understanding crowds, and vice versa. The subject matter covered in this book aims to address a highly focused problem with a strong multidisciplinary appeal to practitioners in both fundamental research and applications. This book is dedicated to solving the problem of group and crowd analysis and modeling in computer vision, pattern recognition and social sciences, and highlighting the open issues and challenges. Despite aiming to address a highly focused problem, the techniques covered in this book, e.g. techniques of segmentation and grouping, tracking and reasoning, are highly applicable to other more general problems in computer vision and machine learning.