Automatically detecting the small group structure of a crowd

Weina Ge, Robert T. Collins, Barry Ruback
2009 2009 Workshop on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV)  
Recent work on computer vision analysis of crowds tends to focus on robustly tracking individuals through the crowd or on analyzing the overall pattern of flow. Our work seeks a deeper analysis of social behavior by identifying the small group structure of crowds, forming the basis for mid-level activity analysis at the granularity of human social groups. Building upon state-of-the-art algorithms for pedestrian detection and multi-object tracking, and inspired by social science models of human
more » ... ollective behavior, we automatically detect small groups of individuals who are traveling together. These groups are discovered using a bottom-up hierarchical clustering approach that compares sets of individuals based on a generalized, symmetric Hausdorff distance defined with respect to pairwise proximity and velocity. We validate our results quantitatively and qualitatively on videos of real-world pedestrian scenes. Where humancoded ground truth is available, we find substantial statistical agreement between our results and the human-perceived small group structure of the crowd.
doi:10.1109/wacv.2009.5403123 dblp:conf/wacv/GeCR09 fatcat:pne4earbwbayxj6ywxlomfrrni