Physical-barrier detection based collective motion analysis

Collective motion is one of the most fascinating phenomena and mainly caused by the interactions between individuals. Physical-barriers, as the particular facilities which divide the crowd into different lanes, greatly affect the measurement of such interactions. In this paper we propose the physical-barrier detection based collective motion analysis (PDCMA) approach. The main idea is that the interaction between spatially adjacent pedestrians actually does not exist if they are separated by the physical-barrier. Firstly, the physical-barriers are extracted by two-stage clustering. The scene is automatically divided into several motion regions. Secondly, local region collectiveness is calculated to represent the interactions between pedestrians in each region. Finally, extensive evaluations use the three typical methods, i.e., the PDCMA, the Collectiveness, and the average normalized Velocity, to show the efficiency and efficacy of our approach in the scenes with and without physical barriers. Moreover, several escalator scenes are selected as the typical physical-barrier test scenes to demonstrate the performance of our approach. Compared with the current collective motion analysis methods, our approach better adapts to the scenes with physical barriers.