Tracking Individual Targets in High Density Crowd Scenes Analysis of a Video Recording in Hajj 2009

TL;DR

This paper introduces a real-time method for tracking individual pedestrians in high-density crowd scenes using high-resolution video, enabling precise velocity and density analysis during the Hajj pilgrimage.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel real-time pedestrian tracking approach in high-density crowds using high-definition video from stationary cameras, with detailed velocity and density measurements.

Findings

Accurate pedestrian velocities as a function of local density are established.

The system precisely documents individual movements during the Tawaf ritual.

Effective tracking in high-density crowds is achieved with high-resolution video data.

Abstract

In this paper we present a number of methods (manual, semi-automatic and automatic) for tracking individual targets in high density crowd scenes where thousand of people are gathered. The necessary data about the motion of individuals and a lot of other physical information can be extracted from consecutive image sequences in different ways, including optical flow and block motion estimation. One of the famous methods for tracking moving objects is the block matching method. This way to estimate subject motion requires the specification of a comparison window which determines the scale of the estimate. In this work we present a real-time method for pedestrian recognition and tracking in sequences of high resolution images obtained by a stationary (high definition) camera located in different places on the Haram mosque in Mecca. The objective is to estimate pedestrian velocities as a function of the local density.The resulting data of tracking moving pedestrians based on video sequences are presented in the following section. Through the evaluated system the spatio-temporal coordinates of each pedestrian during the Tawaf ritual are established. The pilgrim velocities as function of the local densities in the Mataf area (Haram Mosque Mecca) are illustrated and very precisely documented.