Group and Crowd Behavior for Computer Vision

Book excerpt: Group and Crowd Behavior for Computer Vision provides a multidisciplinary perspective on how to solve the problem of group and crowd analysis and modeling, combining insights from the social sciences with technological ideas in computer vision and pattern recognition. The book answers many unresolved issues in group and crowd behavior, with Part One providing an introduction to the problems of analyzing groups and crowds that stresses that they should not be considered as completely diverse entities, but as an aggregation of people. Part Two focuses on features and representations with the aim of recognizing the presence of groups and crowds in image and video data. It discusses low level processing methods to individuate when and where a group or crowd is placed in the scene, spanning from the use of people detectors toward more ad-hoc strategies to individuate group and crowd formations. Part Three discusses methods for analyzing the behavior of groups and the crowd once they have been detected, showing how to extract semantic information, predicting/tracking the movement of a group, the formation or disaggregation of a group/crowd and the identification of different kinds of groups/crowds depending on their behavior. The final section focuses on identifying and promoting datasets for group/crowd analysis and modeling, presenting and discussing metrics for evaluating the pros and cons of the various models and methods. This book gives computer vision researcher techniques for segmentation and grouping, tracking and reasoning for solving group and crowd modeling and analysis, as well as more general problems in computer vision and machine learning. - Presents the first book to cover the topic of modeling and analysis of groups in computer vision - Discusses the topics of group and crowd modeling from a cross-disciplinary perspective, using social science anthropological theories translated into computer vision algorithms - Focuses on group and crowd analysis metrics - Discusses real industrial systems dealing with the problem of analyzing groups and crowds