Video-based crowd density estimation and prediction system for wide-area surveillance

Abstract

Crowd density estimation in wide areas is a challenging problem for visual surveillance. Because of the high risk of degeneration, the safety of public events involving large crowds has always been a major concern. In this paper, we propose a video-based crowd density analysis and prediction system for wide-area surveillance applications. In monocular image sequences, the Accumulated Mosaic Image Difference (AMID) method is applied to extract crowd areas having irregular motion. The specific number of persons and velocity of a crowd can be adequately estimated by our system from the density of crowded areas. Using a multi-camera network, we can obtain predictions of a crowd's density several minutes in advance. The system has been used in real applications, and numerous experiments conducted in real scenes (station, park, plaza) demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method.